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!

Leaping Forward on Leap Day

“Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.” ~Mary Ann Radmacher

Today is February 29^th. It feels kind of funny—and fun to write that because it’s not a common day, is it? I was just thinking about it actually and we won’t have this day again until 2020. Wow. Think about that for a bit. What do you think you’ll be doing on February 29^th, 2020? How will your life be different? How will it be similar? Who will you be spending your day with then? Maybe that’s why it’s called Leap Year. Because we can take a leap into the future (and past if we choose) and imagine all we’ll accomplish in the next four years. All the adventures we’ll go on. All the love we’ll give. 

Sometimes it’s helpful to look back as well, but only in reflection upon the lessons we’ve learned, I think, and on how far we’ve come. What were you doing on February 29^th, 2012? I love numbers and dates so I’m pretty sure I celebrated in some way, but I don’t remember many specifics from that day. I do know I had just had my first surgery ever four years ago this month. And it pretty much confirmed that I had a rare condition called the Nutcracker Syndrome, in which my left renal vein was trapped or smooshed by my aorta and superior mesenteric artery, causing the blood to flow from my kidney in a different direction towards my left ovary, creating internal varicose veins which when swollen caused achy pain and during certain times of the month, excruciating pain. I’m very grateful to say that four years later, my renal vein is flowing properly now, the varicose veins are not causing hardly any discomfort, and I’m 13 weeks pregnant! An amazing little miracle is growing inside me and that wonderful little being will be 3 and a half years old next time we have a February 29^th and celebrate Leap Day!

Do you do anything special on Leap Day or during Leap Year? If not, would you like to start a new tradition? It seems like a good time to reflect on our journey in this beautiful life and to envision what the future may hold for us. It’s also a great time to start taking consistent baby steps towards reaching those goals and dreams of yours. You don’t have to wait until New Year’s to do so. Or if you had a plan that you began on January 1^st and it’s been hard to keep, now is as good of a time as any to reevaluate why that plan may have been difficult to maintain and adjust and start again. 

What’s one way you can create a new positive habit today that will get you one step closer to your dreams? Because once it becomes a habit, each day you will take one more step and before you know it, you’ll be creating new dreams or adding to your current dream. And when you look back to reflect on those steps, you’ll be in awe of all you’ve accomplished because you took that one step today on February 29^th. Let me know how it goes. :-)

Befriending Stress

I’ve started to grow tired of hearing or reading over and over again about “avoiding stress” or “combating stress.”  Do we really have to be at battle or go to war with a natural process? I know some forms of stress don’t feel very good in the moment, but I don’t think it’s actually the stress itself that is the issue. It’s how we react and respond to the stressors. So instead of avoiding or combating, wouldn’t it be more effective to actually befriend it and show it compassion so that responding--instead of reacting--can be made easier? Wouldn’t you rather respond gently to a friend than react violently to an enemy? Which do you think is better for your overall health? I’m thinking friendly interactions feel better and thus are better for us. And if stress is such a common phenomenon that we really deal with every day, wouldn’t it be more helpful and beneficial to our overall well-being to learn how to interact with it, rather than avoid it or fight it all the time? I’m tired of fighting it. I surrender. Now I want to befriend it and show it compassion like I would a friend. Because it’s a real part of our lives and as I learn how to respond gently to stress, won’t I feel lighter and more peaceful and gentle myself?

But I consider myself a grass-roots, down-to-earth kind of person and I want some really practical ways to “befriend” our stress.  It’s easy enough to say or write it down, but how do we actually do it? I believe for any positive change to take place, we must come from a grounded space, well-rested and settled into our center--our core, through deep breathing, mindful awareness of everyday activities, taking our sweet time and not rushing, and through relishing in what we love and giving ourselves the gift of time to do what we love. And if we’re feeling uninspired to do what we love, it’s probably time for more rest and especially time for greater self-compassion, because one of the greatest gifts we gain from doing what we love is making time for us. Yes, US! (I know, hard to believe, huh?) I know it might feel like there isn’t enough time--trust me, I feel this way a lot too--but I have to consistently remind myself that we make time for what we love, we don’t necessarily HAVE time for all we love. 

So instead of doing something that’s not necessary and that we don’t really love, why not redirect our focus and our time to doing something that enlivens us and fills us with inspired passion, joy and energy for life?  One big time sucker is social media. I really do believe that feeling that social connection with our friends and family who we don’t get to see regularly can help cultivate deeper relationships, but I also believe that we enter a kind of time warp when we're on social media where time flies by and before we know it, we’ve spent an hour reading random posts that don’t have much to do with our life mission or our passion or even our close family and friends’ updates. At the same time though, I can see the therapeutic value to watching funny videos or seeing cute photos because it gets us out of our head and worries and we de-stress through laughter. But everything is better with moderation. I’m seriously considering setting the timer on my smart phone before I enter a social media site and when I hear the timer go off after a predetermined amount of time, then I can reevaluate if this is really how I want to spend another 15 minutes of my precious free time. And if it isn’t, then there’s a wonderful opportunity to put down the phone and do something creative.

I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to the Fun-A-Day Challenge 2 years ago this month. Through this challenge, I vowed to have fun creating something new each day of the sometimes dreary month of January. And through a group on social media dedicated to “Fun-A-Day” (see, there are multiple benefits indeed...befriend your social media as well, just don’t let it control all your time!) I had one of my first tastes of forming a daily practice and of having accountability partners that awaited my post each day and in turn which motivated me to follow through and fulfill my vow to have fun each day. :-) The sweet taste of a daily practice expanded beyond the month of January and I decided to post something each day that year, in 2014. (You can see links to each of my monthly intentions with corresponding daily posts from 2014 on the left-hand side of this page.) And I think this was a real turning point in my life and in my wellness-focused studies, because I was finally dedicating time each day to what I had studied and read about for years before, what I was so desperately seeking in a well-balanced life was finally coming to fruition through the gift of daily practice. I highly recommend it to anyone feeling stuck or wanting to finally take that next step in their life towards their big dreams.

So maybe that’s my answer to a grass-roots, more down-to-earth way to befriend stress: create a daily practice--if anything, a practice of daily self-kindness, of making time for yourself to do something that inspires you or lights you up, fills you with energy and makes you feel more alive.  Because with that increased energy and inspiration, stress may no longer look like an enemy which can help us shift our perspective and way we view stress. After all, stress may actually be set up to remind us to slow down, take better care of ourselves, ground ourselves through deep breathing, increase our mindful awareness, and make time for what we love. That does sound more like a friend now, huh?

Would you ever consider making friends with your stress? How would you go about it? I'd love to hear from you! Email me at: maritakane@gmail.com or connect with me on Facebook. :-)

With love and gratitude,
Marita

Stay tuned for Marita's coaching and workshop debut!

Meditations in Falling Off the Goal Wagon

A great deal of my thoughts, frustrations and energy have been dedicated throughout my life to feeling bad for falling off the “wagon.” I think I sometimes envision this wagon being a caravan filled with my hopes and dreams carrying me swiftly to my goal. So when I fall off of it and lose my way, stop doing the things I’ve committed to doing or not do them in the time frame I originally set up, I tend to feel really down. At least at first.  

Other times I start an “I don’t care” campaign in response to my falling off and apathy clouds my normally optimistic and hopeful disposition. In a way, this defiance can be an act of self-love, giving myself permission to give up the time-frame constraints I had originally imposed upon myself and allowing myself to be free and embrace a more impromptu way of living.  

I’ve struggled with these dueling ideas—plan, plan, plan for success and reaching my goals versus let it go, relax, don’t worry, I don’t care. But just now as I type this, another idea popped into my head. What if I stop struggling against my innate nature of planning and relaxing, and fully embrace these seemingly opposite traits to take a more positive stance? Could this taming of the duel inside be the key to peace? Isn’t the idea of envisioning our dreams and then releasing them the very basis for the famous Law of Attraction?  

Could there be a hidden nugget in my angst that I haven’t yet been accessing? I think so. And I’m intrigued. As an action-oriented planner and dreamer, this delights me that in my “laziness” I may have actually been cultivating something of value after all. Maybe all the time when I could have been “productive” and instead gave myself time to rest and “veg” on the couch or on Facebook was actually exactly what I needed to move forward.

Rest is required when on a journey. And setting out to reach our goals and dreams is quite a journey. So of course we need rest! In seeing my resting time as essential and valuable, I then give myself permission to take my sweet time, enjoy the view, reflect…or not, be human, and to gather my strength for the next lag of this incredible journey we call life. 

"You are on the path... exactly where you are meant to be right now... And from here, you can only go forward, shaping your life story into a magnificent tale of triumph, of healing, of courage, of beauty, of wisdom, of power, of dignity, and of love." —Caroline Adams