Heat & Discipline

An 8 week online writing course with Rātā Gordon

What if discipline was not about forcing yourself into productivity, but about learning how to stay in relationship with what matters?

What if creativity was less like extracting content, and more like tending a living ecology?

Heat and Discipline is an 8-week online writing course for people wanting to build a deeper, more sustainable relationship with their creative practice.

This is not a course about writing faster, becoming more productive, or mastering a rigid routine. It is a space for exploring the tensions many of us live inside:

desire and resistance
structure and wildness
practice and exhaustion
discipline and tenderness
longing and avoidance
unfinishedness and devotion

Across eight weeks, we will work with writing prompts, reflective exercises, reading fragments, discussion, and generative practices designed to help you reconnect with your own creative rhythms and develop ways of returning to the work, even when things feel uncertain, fragmented, or stuck.

The course unfolds across two 4-week blocks with a 2-week midwinter pause for integration, wandering, and composting before we return for the second half.

Wednesdays from June 11th 7pm-9pm (NZT)
Online | Limited spaces

Join the waitlist

This course may be for you if…

you long for a more sustainable relationship with creativity
you keep circling unfinished work
productivity culture has flattened your creative life
you want structure without harshness
you are returning to writing after disruption, burnout, grief, parenting, illness, or overwhelm
you want thoughtful creative community
you feel full of fragments, threads, images, or ideas that haven’t found form yet
you want a creative practice that feels alive enough to keep returning to

You do not need to identify as a “serious writer” to join. You do not need to arrive with a polished project or clear direction. You only need some curiosity about what might become possible through sustained attention and return.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to relate to creativity through pressure, self-surveillance, or extraction.

I’m interested in other possibilities.

What we’ll explore

Part I: Gathering Heat

The Condition of Aliveness

Beginning where you actually are.
Creative desire, exhaustion, longing, resistance, and the conditions that help things grow.

Week 1

Creative Ecology

Thinking about creativity as relational and ecological rather than individual performance.
What nourishes your practice? What depletes it?

Week 2

Resistance, Shame & Self-Surveillance

Exploring perfectionism, comparison, internalised productivity, fear of exposure, and the forces that interrupt creative practice.

Week 3

Heat

Working with desire, image, memory, embodiment, urgency, obsession, and the things that pull us toward the work.

Week 4

Midwinter Pause (2 weeks)

A break for wandering, composting, collecting fragments, resting, and allowing things to move beneath the surface.

Optional prompts/invitations will be offered during this time.

Part II: Discipline & Return

Devotion, Ritual & Repetition

Reimagining discipline beyond punishment or control.
Exploring ritual, rhythm, return, and forms of structure that support creative life.

Week 5

Staying With the Work

Working with uncertainty, unfinishedness, doubt, boredom, and the vulnerable middle spaces of practice.

Week 6

Form, Constraint & Experiment

An invitation into play, experimentation, formal structures, and discovering what your work wants from you..

Week 7

Ongoing Practice

Thinking about sustainability, continuation, and the kinds of creative lives we want to build.

Week 8

What's included

8 live online sessions
writing prompts and generative exercises
reflections on creativity, process, ecology, and practice
one 1:1 mentoring session with Rātā
optional sharing and discussion
a small, thoughtful creative container

About the approach

My work is grounded in the belief that creativity is relational, ecological, embodied, and deeply entangled with the conditions we live inside.

Rather than approaching writing through productivity, extraction, or self-surveillance, this course invites participants into slower forms of attention and sustained relationship with creative practice.

I’m interested in forms of discipline that support aliveness rather than flatten it.

About Rātā

Rātā Gordon is a writer, creative arts therapist, mentor, and educator based in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Their work explores creativity, embodiment, ecology, desire, relationality, and transformation through writing, teaching, mentoring, and arts-based practice.

Rata has facilitated writing groups and creative workshops for over a decade, creating spaces that support experimentation, reflection, and sustained creative practice.

You can read more about Rātā here.

Course Details

Dates: Wednesdays from June 11th
Time: 7pm-9pm NZT
Location: Online
Duration: 8 weeks, with a 2-week midwinter break
Group Size: Limited spaces

Pricing

Standard: $650 NZD
Supported places: $520 NZD
Sustainer: $780 NZD

Payment plans are available. A small number of fully funded places are offered for those experiencing financial barriers.