As an eclectic reader and thinker, I have digested many modes  of thought and ways of practicing my profession. Trained in Gestalt therapy and also as a certified personal empowerment coach, I have developed skills to enhance my work. I am wed to a here and now, holistic way of working with clients in a steady, supportive atmosphere of trust and confidentiality, using as much creativity as my background in the arts will generate. Writing, visual art, and poetry are second nature to me. 

I draw inspiration from nature and wisdom from the great poets, classic literature, eastern philosophy, and today's important healers such as Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Jean Houston, and Julia Cameron. To note a few women  of accomplishment who have also inspired me, I must name  Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gloria Steinem, Grace Paley, Mary Oliver, Lisel Mueller and others..... 

     Here are some quotes that I find meaningful...........

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear toward newer and richer experiences ...EleanorRoosevelt

In the depth of winter I learned that within me lay an invincible summer..

                        .Albert Camus

The mind and body are inseparably one. The unity that is 'Me' separates into two streams of experience...The subjective stream as thoughts, feelings and desires...the objective stream as my body. At a deeper level...the two streams meet at a single creative source.  It is from this source that we are meant to live.

                       Deepak Chopra from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell

                      Deepak Chopra from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do...doors open for us, we feel useful and the work we do feels like play --                  Julia Cameron

 

If one is not a swimmer and wishes to reach the opposite shore of a torrential river over which there is no bridge, one must wait for a boat or use the waiting to build a raft  --        from The Daoist Book of Days

 

If I were not human, I would not feel shame   -- W.S. Merwin  poet

 

To bring back creative life, the waters have to be made clean and clear again. We have to wade into the sludge, purify the contaminates, reopen the apertures, protect the flow from future harm. --

The infusion of tuz (soul-fire) into our own ideas, our own lives, the lives of those we touch, that is our work. The shooing of the soul to its home, that is our work. The releasing of a shower of sparks to fill the day, and creating a light we we can find our way through the night, that is our work.

The first question is this: 'what do you want?' Almost everyone asks some version of this...but there is yet one more essential question, and that is:' What does your deeper self desire?'...As women, we learn to poll both sides of our nature and that of others as well.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from Women who Run with the Wolves

 

 

Associations:

I have been a lifetime member of Poets & Writers, Inc., am an Associate Member of The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, a member of The Institute for Advanced Theology at Bard College, and member of WorldPulse a global organization dedicated to the empowerment of women

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NATALIE SAFIR has been publishing poems in small press such as Slant, Images, Xanadu, West Hills Review, Pivot, Madison Review, Mid-America Review, Rhino, Peregrine, Poets On:, The MacGuffin, Berkshire Review, Small Pond Magazine, The Connecticut River Review, The Poetry Review, Negative Capability, The Windsor Review, and Voices International, etc. since the 70's. She has had poems anthologized in college texts: Reading Poetry, Random House Educational Division, in Literature, Mayfield Publishing Co; and The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry, McGraw Hill, l994, and Responding to Literature, 3rd edition, l998, and 4th & 5th editions 2002 - 2007.

Her books published are Moving into Seasons, l981 and To Face the Inscription, l988, La Jolla Poets Press, California. In l998, Singular Speech Press of Canton, Connecticut, published her third collection, Made Visible. Poet and Chairman of the Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, Thomas Lux, said of this collection: “I admire very much these utterly lucid, distilled, and powerful poems.” Her fourth collection A Clear Burning, was published in Fall ‘04. Poet Michael Waters called this a book of “deep and wild sustenance.”

She has been teaching poetry writing workshops since the late 70's: an ongoing private workshop for published poets now in its twenty-first year; a bi-weekly workshop at the Dobbs Ferry Library, workshops and lectures on contemporary poetry at the Scarsdale Library. and twice-yearly workshops at the Lenoir Nature Preserve. She appeared on Westchester Cable in Westchester County; was founder/director of a reading series, The Pomegranate Series in Hastings for nine years and a reading series at the Hastings Library, poetry editor of "Inprint" Magazine, and a founding editor of "Gravida" in the 70's. In Tarrytown, NY she teaches private groups and at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Since 2001, she has been teaching Personal Memoir Writing at The Neighborhood House, a local senior center, funded by Poets & Writers, and at the Warner Library in Tarrytown. She taught her program, Writing as Healing in Fall 2007 at the Hudson Valley Writers Center and in Summer, 2009. She has worked for the WorldPulse organization as a Mentor in their pilot Correspondents program.

She is a certified Personal Empowerment Coach and Gestalt therapist trained at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy in Manhattan, working with groups and private clients since 1998 and has lead personal growth and awareness groups focused on a particular specialty in dreamwork since 2000.

BALANCE

The sky emerging

from the rain’s secrecy

lifts its silver veils

to unroll the marvel

of an iridescent land

So it is when the center holds

both sides in easy balance,

the huge crows you saw

this morning are not

carriers of death

but fattening themselves

on the land’s offering

So it is that around you

a threaded net

spreads out to others

who dance happily into its arms

When you walk toward

the uncomplaining river

lying modestly beside

a wilderness of trees,

it points you to the one bench

dry after the rain

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