Haiku for Healing – Google Classroom Course

Haiku for Healing is an initiative of The Haiku Foundation (THF) examining the therapeutic potentials and benefits of haiku. It includes interviews, articles and courses to explore how does its innate brevity and focus on the “now” enable poets, both experienced and new to this short form, to articulate what Primo Levi (1919-1987) described as, “an absolute need to write. Not only as a moral duty, but as a psychological need.” (If This Is a Man • The Truce Primo Levi, Stuart J. Woolf (Translator), Paul Bailey (Introduction), 1987, Abacus Books)

An important feature of this H4H initiative is this free Google Classroom organised by Geethanjali Rajan, distinguished haiku poet and editor.

It is a two-month programme spanning six modules planned on a Google classroom platform to look at how published poets have expressed pain and separation in their work and explore the potential in haiku to articulate our own deeply-felt thoughts and experiences. In her own words Geethanjali offers:

Let’s work together and explore how we can use haiku as a wellness practise to express ourselves through visiting and processing moments of pain or isolation, and to savour the quieter moments that foster mindfulness and gratitude. The programme will involve reading and appreciating haiku written by published poets as well as trying to pen a haiku or two of our own.

The Haiku for Healing Google Classroom starts Monday 6th October 10 a.m. GMT and concludes Monday, 1st December midnight GMT.

The course is free and there are 10 places available.

To register please use the Haiku for Healing contact form on our Contact page.

Registration closes Monday, 15th September midnight, GMT.

Thank you to all the poets who have registered. We are truly humbled and amazed by your response. There is now a waiting list of poets. If some poets decide to withdraw due to reasons of time or other constraints then we will post an update about the availability of places.

Coming up on September 22:  an interview with Julie Bloss Kelsey in which she addresses PTSD through the lens of haiku and its related short forms.

Bios

Sonam Chhoki finds the Japanese short-form poetry resonates with her Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. She is inspired by her father, Sonam Gyamtsho, the architect of Bhutan’s non-monastic modern education and by her mother, Chhoden Jangmu, who taught her: “Being a girl doesn’t mean you can’t do anything.” She is the principal editor, and co-editor of haibun for the online journal of Japanese short forms, cattails.

Her chapbook of haibun, The Lure of the Threshold was published in May 2021. Mapping Absences, a collaboration of haibun, tan bun and tanka prose with Mike Montreuil was published in 2019. Another collaboration with Geethanjali Rajan: Unexpected Gift was published in November 2021. She organised a year-long email course in 2024 for The Haiku Foundation’s Haiku for Parkinson’s project.

Read past Haiku for Healing posts here.

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