Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Do this when you're hurting and scared and in need of healing: Create something. Then give it away. 

Create from your own well of talent and skill and knowledge and expertise. Your well is full. Bring something up from the well, and give it to someone else who is also hurting and scared. 

Bake a cake. Build a birdhouse or a website. Create a business plan. Assemble a model. Create a sacred space. Plant a container garden. Cut and glue a greeting card from colored paper. Design a better bedpan. Knit a prayers shawl. Dance for someone. Sing for someone. The possibilities are literally endless. 

I know of an amazing teenage girl who, while undergoing treatment for cancer, painted funny faces, designs, slogans and jokes on empty plastic ice cream buckets that she kept close at hand for her own sick days. Then she began making them to give to the other patients in the hospital's oncology ward. She said, "As long as we're going to throw up, we might as well have something funny to look at when we do!" 

Focusing on a creative project helps us relax and become calmer. Thinking about who we will give it to helps us remember that, no matter what we're facing, we're not alone, that others have gone through what we're going through and come out well and whole on the other side, and many more are going through it at the same time we are. 

These "healing projects" help heal both the creator and the lucky recipient, and they are the basis of the vision of Wellspring4Healing: creativity in any form is healing to the person doing the creating as well as to those who view/taste/hear/experience it!

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