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Writer's pictureHannah Marsh

Mindfulness & Creativity during a Pandemic

This is a difficult time with many of us isolated at home, worried, grieving for our own lost sense of connection and for all the people in the world suffering due to the pandemic.

Image by Carlos de Miguel

While creativity can be a wonderful outlet for our fears and uncertainty, I want to give you permission to pause. To slow down and tend to your sensitivity. The creative process requires periods of taking in, attending to oneself and the world. What might appear on the surface as "doing nothing" can hold great depths, much like our practice of meditation. As an added support during this time, here's a generous resource from Tara Brach, a warm and wise mindfulness teacher. Create your own class, or even a meditation retreat at home: https://www.tarabrach.com/create-home-retreat/ This week, I'm sending loving-kindness to you all. I hope we can meet in person again soon. I'll leave you with a poem by Lynn Ungar, who shifts the perspective on pandemic away from fear, towards compassion and possibility.


Pandemic

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down.

And when your body has become still, reach out with your heart. Know that we are connected in ways that are terrifying and beautiful. (You could hardly deny it now.) Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.) Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. Reach out your words. Reach out all the tendrils of compassion that move, invisibly, where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love-- for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, so long as we all shall live.

--Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

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