Workshop Spotlight - Journey Through the Body: Mindfulness in Journaling
To “journey through the body” in journaling, then, is to approach writing as a spiritual self-care practice. It means “taking a small amount of time… to really meet and sit with the real, authentic, living being that you are.” Rather than treating writing as output or performance, Dulce frames it as encounter, an intentional turning inward through simple, accessible practices.
Her workshop is grounded in research on mindfulness and well-being. Studies such as Urken and LeCroy (2021) demonstrate that expressive writing interventions can significantly improve mental health outcomes and foster self-compassion. Villamil, Weisbaum, and Siegel (2019) describe three “pillars” of mind training — focused attention, open awareness, and loving kindness — that together cultivate a meditative state. Dulce’s doctoral work explores how journaling activates these same pillars. Through daily practice, she suggests, the brain can engage in focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention, producing effects comparable to formal meditation while shaping energy and consciousness in sustained ways.
Importantly, Journey Through the Body challenges narrow understandings of journaling as productivity tracking or emotional venting. Dulce’s session includes a three-page automated writing practice, a body-mapping autoethnographic exercise incorporating sound and sensation, and a guided visual meditation designed to evoke embodied awareness before writing begins. These activities seek to “evoke one’s spiritual side,” expanding what writing can mean.
By the end of the workshop, Dulce hopes participants experience “peace in their bodies, a pause in their thinking, and a different perspective of what writing could mean to them.” More than technique, she offers a shift, an invitation to glimpse the spiritual dimension of the self and to recognize the page as a companion in that journey.
Facilitator: Tawnee Dulce
Friday March 6, 3pm to 4.30pm, 12-115
Mariam Vakani is a PhD student in Higher Education. Her work examines caregivers and institutional life through relational and equity-focused frameworks. She writes across academic and creative forms, drawn to the spaces where pedagogy, ethics, and storytelling meet and where imagining more responsive futures becomes possible.
