Poetry as Alchemy
A Guided Creative Process
What if every experience of your life is the Sacred calling for your attention?
Poetry as Alchemy is a self-paced course for transforming lived experience into poetry.
Here’s what you can expect:
Five stages, ten videos, self-paced. A clear repeatable structure for turning any experience — joy, loss, longing, wonder — into a poem. Something to come back to again and again as life unfolds.
❋ A Process You Can Return ToDraw on the devotional poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, and Mirabai alongside contemporary voices like Mary Oliver and Taylor Swift. Learn how the greatest poets (sacred and secular) use metaphor, image, and specificity to evoke feeling.
❋ Rooted in the Mystic TraditionNothing is wasted. Your unique human experience is the source material. A walk in the woods, a moving yoga class, a romantic relationship, a simple Tuesday morning. This course teaches you to harvest your lived experience and uncover the art inside it.
❋ Your Life as Raw MaterialIn addition to technique, this course is more deeply about meeting your life with reverence and attention. It uses poetry as a tool for perception and meaning so you feel a stronger connection to Life.
❋ Beyond Mere TechniqueModule 1 & 2 as a sample.
This course is offered inside my Digital Patreon Library.
It is included in the Saraswati Tier (monthly membership at $20 / month).
The course can also be purchased on its own for $49 CAD.
Course Modules
-
Poetry offers a way to shape memory, emotion, sensation, and insight into language that reveals deeper meaning. Through metaphor, structure, and rhythm, we can move beyond simply describing what happened and begin to understand what an experience stirred, revealed, or changed in us.
-
In this session, we focus on how to prepare yourself and your environment for meaningful creative work.
-
In this session, you’ll choose the experience or theme that will become the foundation for your poem. We begin by working with one moment that still feels alive, meaningful, or emotionally charged for you.
-
In this session, you’ll be guided through techniques to capture everything you remember about your chosen experience — gathering source material.
-
In this session, you’ll begin shaping the raw material from memory harvesting into meaningful poetic elements.
-
In this session, you’ll transform your key images and themes into language that evokes real feeling.
You’ll learn how metaphor makes abstract experience tangible, and how specificity adds emotional depth and immediacy. Through guided reflection, you’ll identify sensory qualities, symbolic parallels, and precise details that bring your poem to life.
-
In this session, you’ll explore the perspective of your poem — who is speaking, and who they are speaking to.
You’ll experiment with different lenses that shape emotional tone and meaning, such as speaking to the beloved, the divine, memory, yourself, or even from the perspective of an object or place. You’ll also explore how tense, voice, and point of view influence how the experience is felt.
-
In this session, you’ll shape how your poem moves—its length, pacing, and rhythm—and learn how these structural choices deepen emotional impact.
You’ll explore how to match the pacing of the poem to the pacing of the experience, and how rhythm (with or without rhyme) creates cohesion and musicality.
-
In this closing section, you’ll reflect on what your experience and creative process have revealed. Through guided prompts, you’ll explore what was awakened, what still lingers, and what meaning or insight has emerged.
-
In this 45-minute talk, we explore a key aspect of the Narada Bhakti Sutras as a living, relational path of yoga. We look at how bhava, the feeling-tone and attitude of the heart, shapes your experience of life and your relationship to the Divine as the big picture, all of life, and your innermost Self.
Drawing heavily on poetry, tantric and bhakti traditions, as well as guided reflection, this session explores the classical bhāvas (servant, parent, child, friend, lover) as lenses we can consciously “try on” in relationship with God/Source/Universe.