Available Workshops
Our workshops are designed to help organizations and individuals bring wellness, personal growth, and spiritual expansiveness into their lives. Each workshop is tailored to suit the needs of the individual/organization.
Contact us at palabracenter@gmail.com to discuss your organization's needs and expectations for the workshop of your preference.
The Sacred Feminine
in the Taino Culture
“The human mind is hungry for an image of a Divine Mother that would, like an umbilical cord, reconnect to the Womb of Being, restoring the lost sense of trust and containment in a dimension that may be beyond the reach of our intellect, yet is accessible to us through our deepest instincts.” (Harvey and Baring, 1996)
This workshop is the result of Dr. Medrano’s research on the spirituality of the Taíno people of the Dominican Republic. She invites participants to dive into the depth and breath of Taino spirituality, seeking archetypes and mirrors to reflect on their wholeness. The workshop is offered in the spirit of reclaiming the old integrated way of male and female energies to navigate the complicated waters of today’s world.
This workshop helps us get closer to that image of the Divine Mother for which we are longing. It promotes a reconnection with our deepest instinct, and our innate ability to create life and sustainability. Participants immerse themselves in the wisdom of the feminine to see how intuition and compassion are two strong forces that could potentially change the world for the better. They learn how to capitalize their innate ability to be in relationship and to nurture others.
Participants in this workshop learn about 5 Taíno deities: Atabey, Itiba Cahubaba, Mama Jicotea (Caguama), Guabonito, and Guabancex. Through group discussion and writing, participants find ways to incorporate their Wisdom in day-to-day life. Through learning about these taíno archetypes participants explore how the sacred feminine values and beliefs, such as empathy, nurturance, compassion, among many others, have being replaced by a dominant masculine culture of individuation and power thirst, which can deter them from finding true identity.
Mindful Writing:
Four Pathways to Wholeness
This writing workshop is an open invitation to drop into the body to hear the latent voices that can awaken new insight and creative flights in writers. True reconciliation between body and mind will uncover the wholeness we were born with and lost on the way to adulthood.
Participants will write, reflect, meditate and engage in discussions about what it means to free ourselves from fragmentation and find ourselves whole again. Fragmentation of the self has unintended consequences. Often, the effects are depression, anxiety, and blocked creativity. These effects can fuel the conceptual mind and either silence the somatic voices or intensify negative narratives in the cross of both.
We will examine discernment closely. A possible side effect of the Mindful Writing is a unique capacity to discern what we want to integrate from our big history and what we want to leave behind; with this, we will look back into ancestral wisdom as a restorative and healing practice that reinvigorates creativity.
This class is designed for writers curious about integrating the multiple parts of life into cohesive wholeness. It is meant for individuals interested in creating psychological flexibility and emotional language fluidity to embrace life with curiosity, detachment, and depth.
The writing prompts lead to exploring new ways to become alive and creative.
Writing from the Roots
This workshop is designed to help writers explore their relationships to their culture of origin and to see how that culture can expand beyond a racial or ethnic identity, transcending and including it. Participants will be provided with a series of poems on the topic of identity to elicit discussions on how we are more than a name, a language, and cultural practices. The workshop is informed by mindfulness, poetry therapy, and the concept of spirituality as an all-encompassing practice that helps us see the vastness of human nature.
How does our culture of origin inform who we are? How do we go back to our true essence? Although these questions are complex, and we don’t expect to answer them in the time frame of this workshop, the invitation is open to begin the journey, moving forward into a search for authenticity; peeling off the mask of identity to find our true nature.