AIRED: September 26, 2016– 11 am PST
TITLE: “Transforming Relationships: Using Meditation and Writing as Vehicles for Healing, Well-Being and Community”
SPECIAL GUEST: Jackie Parker
There is great power in the stories that we carry. According to Jackie Parker, the stories that wait to be written hold truths that can heal and deepen us.
In Jackie’s The Power of Our Stories workshops held in communities, healthcare settings, and workplaces throughout the country, she helps attendees learn to express themselves and connect to each other in ways we all long for and need.
As her teaching has evolved, Jackie has greatly enjoyed creating workshops for women and their teenage daughters. She share one memorable event in which many of the mothers were first generation Americans: Mexican, Filipino, Korean, who, by any standards had achieved a great deal having worked and studied their way to impressive positions, bought homes, raised families, lived in a manner far exceeding their parents’ dreams for them.
But in spite of their achievements, they were having trouble getting along with their teenage daughters. One of the women suggested including their daughters in the workshop, hoping that by writing together they would find a way to create meaningful connections and a basis for understanding each other as women. The daughters, who had known each other since they were toddlers, agreed to give it a try.
Leaving their phones and connective devices in another room, they began simply by sitting in quiet together, breathing in silence for five minutes. As moods shifted, each picked up their pens and they flowed into writing their stories.
At the end of the workshop, the group heard many deep and wise stories. As Jackie shares, “It was a day like so many in my workshops, where profound connections were made on many levels, as mothers and daughters embraced each other and the process of reconnecting and healing began.
ABOUT JACKIE PARKER
Jackie Parker, the author of Our Lady of Infidelity: A Novel of Miracles, is an award-winning poet. She has written a bestselling young adult novel, Love Letters to my Fans, and a full-length play, Absentia and occasionally blogs for the Huffington Post.
Jackie has taught writing in schools and colleges, hospitals, living rooms, coffee houses, skyscrapers, nursing homes, conference halls, backyards, and front porches throughout North America—as far north as breathtaking Newfoundland. Her transformational workshops, The Power of Our Stories, use meditation and writing to bring creativity and community into the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.
For the past seven years she has also been a teacher of Kundalini Yoga meditation. It was Our Lady of Infidelity that led her to this beautiful practice. Her first meditation experience happened at an artist’s colony. She was not seeking it out. She was not even interested in meditation, but meditation was interested in her.
Born in New York City, a child who loved books and writing, her ambition was to become a writer, a teacher, and a farmer. She now lives a stone’s throw from Hollywood in a hundred-plus year old house with a porch and enough land to qualify as an urban farm. She is currently thinking about rain barrels, and working on her next novel.
