Women, Poetry, and Spirituality weekend retreats bring together circles of women to nourish ourselves and each other in mind, body, heart, will, and spirit through the transformative power of poetry, ritual, and community. Organized and hosted by Annie Finch, Rozanne Gold, and Marianela Medrano, Women, Poetry, and Spirituality retreats are directed to all who identify as women and are interested in deepening their spirituality through the poetry of women -— including ourselves. Each of our retreats explores how poetry and spirituality can nourish women’s healthy ways of being with ourselves and with the world. Our mission is to support women's transformation through the nurturing power of poetry and rhythmic language, women-centered ritual in connection with the Divine Feminine, and supportive community.
Aiming to bypass androcentric biases and rediscover an integral way of interbeing, our circle of women absorbs poetry that values and affirms women as subjects and makers of history — poems that honor, rather than fear, women, the body, and the Divine Feminine. Our retreat's transformations connect the poems we read with the qualities of specific goddesses, such as Norse Goddess Freya, Hindu Goddess Durga, five Goddesses of the Taíno cosmogony, Celtic Brigid, Yoruba Yemaya—-and your own ancestral goddesses, if you are so moved. Guided poetic practices move us in rhythm with the elemental powers of language for spiritual growth, and time to write outside renews our healing connection with nature as a manifestation of the Great Mother who has secrets to reveal to us.
Our reading and creating of poetry are also deepened by intuitive practices such as altar building, walking meditation, mindful eating, and rituals of healing and growth as we nourish the five core aspects of women’s lives: vision/manifestation, physical/abundance, social/emotion, passion/creativity, and intuition/spirituality.
Participants return home with a journal full of fertile explorations into language and self and a renewed sense of connection with our own creative and spiritual wealth as women.
What Participants Are Saying
"I really loved being part of this retreat! The instructors were warm, caring, encouraging, and extremely knowledgeable. The divine feminine theme around which the retreat was structured affirmed participants’ strength, opened the floor for discussions about survival strategies for women, and facilitated personal explorations of these topics amongst a supportive community of women.
The retreat provided ample opportunity for me to find personal connections to the material presented and to explore these newfound connections through poetry writing. The poetry writing was carefully scaffolded with preliminary journal writing on the personal connections as well as with the examination of poems which exemplified the topic at hand.
Each session of the retreat was devoted to one of the five directions (east, west, north, south, and center). In keeping with the multiple layers of the workshop, each direction was connected to a specific element and quality as well as to a specific meter which we then had the chance to explore in our poetry. Even I, who am not a poet but attended to learn about the Divine Feminine, ended up writing a poem I was happy with!!!
I would recommend this retreat to any woman who is interested in learning more about the Divine Feminine, in engaging in personal explorations of her experiences as a woman, and/or in further developing herself as a poetry writer."— Martha Rosas, Winter Solstice Retreat, 2019
Upcoming Women, Poetry, Spirituality Events
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Teachers
Annie Finch, of Celtic and Scandinavian lineage, is an award-winning feminist poet, writer, editor, speaker, and performer. Her books include Eve, Calendars, The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, and Among the Goddesses, which received the Sarasvati Award for Poetry from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology. She is also the editor of the landmark collection Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. Finch's poetry has appeared in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and onstage at Carnegie Hall. She has shared her poetry on five continents and travels widely to speak, perform, and to teach workshops on writing and women’s spirituality. Annie incorporates the practice of The Magic of Rhythmically Writing, her unique system of transformative rhythmic writing, into every Women, Poetry, and Spirituality retreat.
Marianela Medrano is a Dominican writer, poet and a psychotherapist with a Ph.D in psychology whose practice include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Mindfulness and Integral Psychotherapy. Medrano has trained in Mindfulness and spirituality and in trauma-specific modalities such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and is a Mindful Eating instructor/facilitator. She has done extensive research on the Divine Feminine in the Taino culture, has lectured in many countries, and has published her poetry widely in journals and in books including: Oficio de Vivir (