photo by Amber Johnston
Sarah Tarr Kowalski is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher based in Philadelphia, PA. Her work explores themes of radical transformation—personal, cultural, and natural. Sarah’s visual art has been shown at a number of galleries, including Abington Art Center, Wayne Art Center, and iMPeRFeCT gallery, and her handmade artist books Attempts and Vortex (which was made with collaborator Kurt Allerslev) are housed in the collection of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Her paintings live in dozens of private collections. Sarah holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine, and her stories and essays have appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines. She’s currently at work on a memoir. She teaches yoga, offers 1:1 healing sessions, and runs workshops on the creative process both online and in Philadelphia.
My background
A lifelong writer, one of my primary obsessions has always been channeling. Finding that flow state where you’re collaborating with the mystery, letting work emerge through you.
I’d had early experiences where I’d wake from a dream with a story pulsing, nearly fully formed. I’d had contact with Source, with inner knowings that felt deeper than anything I knew how to talk about.
Has this happened for you too?
Sometimes your art knows things before your conscious mind does.
Art had changed my life. Art had practically saved my life, sometimes. I wanted to understand how to give something back to its mystery, to become part of its transformative lineage.
Yet I was also blocked a lot of the time. Cut off from my own channel by a chorus of mean and skeptical voices in my head, or shut down by one piece of criticism from a professor.
I grew passionate about finding out why it was like this, and how to change.
I got an MFA in fiction writing, and took Lynda Barry’s amazing “Writing the Unthinkable” workshop. I discovered yoga seemed to help quiet my inner critics, and dove into daily practice, then teacher training. I’ve taught yoga for more than a decade, and gone down rabbit holes of mythology, philosophy, neuroplasticity, somatics, and more.
Somewhere along the way, access to flow state began to feel more steady and reliable. I started teaching “Yoga for Writers” workshops,” drawing on yoga and Buddhist philosophy, nervous system regulation, and practices of movement and visualization to help participants tap in. Things were opening.
Then in 2020, I sustained two concussions. Unable to drive, teach, or really look at screens, I was forced to restructure my brain and my life. It was during recovery that I found painting. Although I’m a fourth-generation painter from a family of artists, I’d always been “the writer of the family.” But once I started painting, a whole new channel opened.
As if lifetimes of art wanted to pour through. I’ve made more than 2,000 paintings since 2020, and painting has clarified aspects of process that more fully inform my writing and teaching.
I’ve been offering Entering the Cave: Sacred Practice for Artists series since 2022, and refining ways of helping artists and creative people move through blocks, connect to Source, and incorporate ritual and shadow work into their processes of tuning in to the mystery.