Exploring Self-Forgiveness
A Creative Writing workshop - Conversations on Self-Forgiveness - Blog: Reckoning with Ourselves
Self-Forgiveness: Creative Writing Workshop
We are delighted to announce that our new creative writing workshop Self-forgiveness: Making meaning as a foundation for change is now live!
Co-facilitated by our Programme Development Lead, Sandra Barefoot, and storyteller Anne-Marie Cockburn, this creative writing workshop invites participants to reflect on prompts and poetry as a means of exploring how making meaning of our past can support us in our journey towards self-forgiveness.
This workshop offers the following:
Four video sessions that work in sequence (professionally captioned for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing).
Writing prompts and exercises.
A downloadable PDF resource.
Conversations on Self-Forgiveness
In addition to the workshop, we are excited to present to you a series of five on-demand online conversations, also led by Sandra. The series features some of our many storytellers, each who explore the questions, complexities and ambiguities that make self-forgiveness so very hard.
This exploration raises difficult and uncomfortable questions. In these conversations you can listen to our storytellers, as well as Dr. Masi Noor and our Founder, Marina Cantacuzino, who reveal insights about finding connection and compassion in the most unexpected places.
Blog: Reckoning with Ourselves
Following this summer’s online series on self-forgiveness, our Programme Development Lead, Sandra Barefoot, writes on the complexity of self-reconciliation in a world that often teaches us to be hard on ourselves.
In drawing from her experience facilitating the series, and the spoken testimonies given by our storytellers, Sandra explores how perceptions of self are so deeply informed by the shame of internal and external gaze of others, making self-forgiveness one of the hardest routes to take.
“After a traumatic event, you are at the mercy of how to reconcile with yourself just as you are with the reactions of others which means that self-forgiveness is as much about untangling your own perception of yourself as from others’ perceptions.” - Sandra Barefoot
We would like to extend our thanks to all of the storytellers who joined us for this series: Ruchi Singh, Dunia Shafik, Jacob Dunne, Samantha Lawler and Lis Cashin. We would also like to thank Marina Cantacuzino and Dr. Masi Noor for their contributions and expertise.
I am glad to run across your website. I work in narrative psychology, which helps people with issues of forgiveness through oral autobiography. Based on this work, I question whether self-forgiveness is the most appropriate goal for some people. Some people land on self-acceptance and others arrive at a point where they experience a sense of forgiveness from source outside themselves. This source can be God, or nature, or the universe, or a transcendent reality that is hard to define. Some philosophers question whether it is even possible for a self to forgive the self.