Creative Stress Management--The Class

This coming Sunday I'll be facilitating a class on creative stress management, a topic that has been near and dear to my heart for many years. Through trial and error and working in social services, giving my heart and energy to others, I realized that I needed to focus more on managing stress and developing wellness practices. Through many years of research and a passion for shining light on others' creativity, I've developed a class that I'm happy to present to the world this Sunday.

Nearly two years ago in 2014, I facilitated my first official workshop on creative stress management through collage for a professional development day at Edmonds Community College, where I then worked. I provided blank notebooks and each participant used the cover page as the backing for their collage. They were instructed to rip or cut out any images or words that spoke to them. They could then use the notebooks later to record their dreams and goals or for anything they liked. There were no other rules. They were the bosses, and they loved it! And I fell in love! I realized quickly that this is something I want to share with more people and at the same time, something that puts me in my own creative flow.

Several months later, I had the opportunity to combine mindful breathing with collage at another professional development day but this time at Bellevue College. I absolutely loved seeing the relaxation on participants' faces and in their shoulders as they followed a simple breathing exercise. Our collages that day also focused on specifically on work-life balance.

Then last summer in 2015, I had the opportunity to lead another mindful breathing exercise and collage session for a wellness challenge at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. Again, the experience reaffirmed my passion for helping others feel stress relief and move towards a greater level of well-being. And people began to request more opportunities to rip and tear inspirational images and words from magazines and flyers to create their own unique visual oasis! I offered 3 more sessions--one focusing on goal setting, another on our personal missions, and the latest session with a group of early childhood education employees on a professional development day.

In addition to workplace creative stress management, I've hosted several collage parties for friends over the past several years as well, at first to try out my ideas and make sure they flowed well and then to continue spreading the creative stress management love. And it's more fun to create and inspire when you're in the company of friends!

With that said, I also enjoy creating when watching TV, when I want to refocus on my wellness and goals, when I'm just hanging out, when I feel inspired, so since I created my collage notebook two years ago, I have filled the pages of the notebook with mini-wellness collages. It's now one of my prized possessions. Think vision boards, but in miniature and mobile form. I can take the notebook anywhere or turn to a particular page and focus on it to feel a renewal of inspiration.

As you can tell, I'm wild about creative stress management and I can't wait to share it with more people. If you're interested in attending my upcoming class on May 1st, please send me an email at: maret.carrillo@gmail.com. More information is below or you can visit: www.facebook.com/owningyourgoodness. (You can pay the supplies fee when you arrive on Sunday.)  Looking forward to creating greater wellness with you!

Ecua-Gring@ Miracles

Four more months to motherhood—only 20 or so more weeks before we get to meet our little ecua-gring@! Wow! It’s hard to believe that I’m already 20 weeks along! But then again, we’ve done so much in the last 5 months. Picture this: just 5 months ago, my husband and I were visiting the magical coastal village of Canoa in Ecuador while on vacation. There was a soft breeze, beautiful waves, warm sand under our toes, great people all around, a sense of peace that came over us in this magical place on Earth.

Tragically this past Saturday Canoa and many other coastal villages and towns in Northern and central Ecuador were destroyed after a 7.8 earthquake hit. Over 500 didn’t survive. Hundreds are still missing. Many more are injured and even more have lost their homes and businesses. Hundreds of aftershocks have occurred in the same area since Saturday and one early this morning was 6.2 on the Richter scale! We pray the rescuers can find more survivors today and that the aftershocks finally stop. I just can’t imagine the terror and trauma the survivors are living right now. It has been an extremely emotional week, to say the least.

One uplifting thing though, despite all the devastation and tragedy, is seeing how the Ecuadorian people have united to support the affected areas. Lines of people in the major cities form to provide donated items and caravans of donations are on their way to the Manabi and Esmeraldas provinces, which were most hardly hit by the earthquake. The Ecuadorian community abroad where I live in the Seattle area have come together quickly to put together a fundraising event this Sunday so all the proceeds can go to helping the victims of this tragic natural disaster recover and rebuild their lives.

Blogs and articles have been written about donation sites for those who are far away and still want to help. I know it’s still not enough because the damage is so massive, but it does fill me with a little more optimism and hope for the future for everyone affected by this disaster.

And this very same week on the homefront, our baby has started to tap! I wouldn’t call it a kick or jab yet, but just two nights ago I started feeling a tap-tap from inside, especially after eating something sweet. I know the baby has been moving all around for awhile now but he or she is finally big enough to tap me! Our little ecua-gring@. And tomorrow we get to see our baby on the ultrasound to make sure everything is developing well and to find out the gender!

So many different kinds of emotions, and add pregnancy hormones to the mix and you have one weepy mama here. And on top of it all, the many things I have been meaning to start doing during my pregnancy are starting to catch up with me—prenatal yoga, reading all those great holistic pregnancy books, reading more about bilingualism and child development, learning more lullabies, taking birthing classes, preparing for my maternity leave at work, going on more romantic dates with my hubby, organizing the house, starting my coaching business—eek! And all this is supposed to take place in the next 3.5 months—holy cow! That’s not that much time, is it? It’s amazing how fast 40 weeks can go by. Truly it is! It also helps me think about prioritizing because that is A LOT to try to get done in such a short amount of time when I’m also working full time, when we have a busy social and family schedule, when I’m offering my first stress management class in the community on May 1^st, when we’ve had visitors from Ecuador and New York over the past month, when we sometimes just want to (and need to) rest and relax and have a little fun. So staying realistic about how much I truly expect myself to accomplish while I only have a little over a month left in the 2^nd trimester and then the 3^rd trimester begins! Wow! It’s all very exciting though!

It’s really hard to describe the vast range of emotions I’ve felt this week—the roller coaster of fear, despair, horror, sadness with the news of the earthquake in Ecuador, and then hope and gratitude for all the support of the victims, and love and excitement filling my heart for the new life developing inside me. Wow. This is life, huh? The full range of it. The good, bad, ugly, beautiful, and miraculous parts of life.

Click here for more information about my upcoming class on creative stress management.