My Recent Adventure: Making a Soul-Shirt from a Cast-off Jacket

Sharon Barnes Creative Healing, Soul Care Leave a Comment

For eons, people have marked significant life passages, prepared for goal achievement, invited desired changes to show up in their lives through making things which represented the intangible, hidden, archetypal aspects of the coming event. We still do. We celebrate graduations, weddings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, even birthdays and other events. Often this includes special clothes to wear as part of the specialness of the celebration. In ancient times, not-so-wonderful changes such as deaths and other losses were also commemorated by wearing ‘special’ clothes: people wore black for a specified length of time to mark, honor and even facilitate the …

My Scrap Angel: Life Lessons Learned While Quilting

Sharon Barnes Contemplative Handwork, Creative Healing, emotional resilience, Existential Depression, Grief and loss, Hero's Journey, Overcoming Adversity Leave a Comment

Have you ever started a creative project that went so badly you trashed it? I have–more times than I’d like to admit. I had heard that mistakes can be our finest learning experiences, but I’d not relished that idea until I reclaimed one of my discarded pieces, and unexpectedly discovered how to reclaim my life, too. An hourglass quilt block I had made from scraps contained too many mistakes to use, so I pitched it. The triangles didn’t have points; I could have done better when I was nine years old. The parallel lines weren’t parallel–they would have made a …

5 Intuitive, Creative Steps to Heal from Life’s Hurts

Sharon Barnes Creative Coping, Creative Healing, Overcoming Adversity Leave a Comment

An Intuitive, Creative Approach to Healing from Life’s Hurts Or, How to E-E-E-K-K Your Way Through Adversity to Destinations of Delight When tough times hit and our life’s path seems to disappear in the fog; when we are faced with illness, loss, financial reversals or other adversity, it can be easy to feel like we have lost our moorings.  We may struggle to keep our feet under us, or to change the metaphor, to keep our heads above water; we may be overwhelmed by it all or we may want to pretend that all is well even when we know …

Compost is Nature’s Original Recycling Project

Sharon Barnes Overcoming Adversity Leave a Comment

In Processing Complex Emotions, Nature’s Original Recycling Project Shows Us the Path to Healing: Composting in our gardens transforms organic material like grass clippings, food garbage and tree leaves into fertilizer. Transforming manure into fertilizer is nature’s original recycling project. Complex emotions need composting. First, we gather them together and pile them up in one place, like we do with compost or manure. Then, we mix them up, expose them to the air, sunshine, rain and then we leave them alone while we go on with our lives, before repeating the mixing process over and over again, until the compost or …

Life Lessons Learned While Quilting

Sharon Barnes Creative Coping, Creative Healing, Overcoming Adversity Leave a Comment

If it has to be done, make it fun. Look everywhere and see all there is to see, even if no one else sees it. See life through the eyes of an artist Look for life’s colors, shapes, textures, and shades of light and dark. Don’t shut down when you face problems; open up to ALL of life’s experiences. Learn the same thing as often as necessary until you know it by heart. Multi-task without multi-tasking, make what you do accomplish several things at once. Take whatever comes to you in life and transform it into a beautiful adventure. Scrap …

Creative and Contemplative Handwork Is a Deep Practice

Sharon Barnes Creative Coping, Creative Healing Leave a Comment

Creative and Contemplative Handwork is a deep creative, spiritual, emotional and emotional practice. The process of making something which tangibly demonstrates our inner state and represents our inner process reaches deep within us, taps into and brings out emotion and experience that cannot be found or expressed otherwise. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture that the Self creates is worth a hundred thousand words. We create something for which we have no words; we express experience and emotion for which we have no explanation. Then as we contemplate what we have made, words emerge and return …

LifeStick

Sharon Barnes Creative Healing, Overcoming Adversity Leave a Comment

When we make things with our hands that represent our inner process, the practice of making them helps us grasp that lasting healing, growth and change don’t happen in an instant. They take time, creativity and action, the same as crafting our symbolic objects does.   ScrapLady Sharon

How to Transform as You Come Back From Adversity

Sharon Barnes Creative Healing, Grief and loss, Overcoming Adversity, quotations Leave a Comment

Hannah, a doll made from a stray sock, is quite a helpless creature. Hannah sometimes has days with her face in the dirt, like a caterpillar.     When she can’t take any more of life’s dirt, she creates a cocoon for herself, Where she can heal, rejuvenate and recreate herself. But eventually the cocoon becomes a prison, and she finds a way to break out. As she emerges, she discovers that while cocooning, she has been transformed. Hannah is helpless no longer; she can fly wherever she pleases. Helpless Hannah has become the Comeback Queen! By following Hannah’s process …