Wellness Resources
Welcome!
Tools for staying centered in the body:
Just like we have a safety toolkits at home and even a medicine kit nowadays, I suggest you also have a mental health kit which could include:
- Sketchbook, markers, sharpies, anything you like to express your self.
- Fidget toys, squeezable objects.
Expression = release. What is not released stays in the body, turns into anger, pain, resentment, nothing good. We end up snapping at others, eating uncontrollably or not eating, having trouble sleeping, being irritable, etc.
Forms of releasing: Visual art, poetry, music lyrics, pillow for yelling, foam noodle of releasing anger safely, body movement, hiking, dancing, etc. Try to engage the body in doing something that is screen free.
Body containment: tightness, heavy blankets. Give your body a physical sense of safety by wrapping yourself up like a Burrito, and reminding your body what it was like to be tightly held in the womb. This is a way of accessing safety stored in our primal brains.
Give the body input for the senses: movement, smell, taste, touch, human interaction. Complete isolation is not healthy my friends, we lose our sense of belonging and dissolve into a deep rest or deep-pression.
Be-Long = longer being. What or who can provide a reconnection to belonging for you? Bio family or chosen family can bring expansion to our current realities.
Tool for feeling our feelings:
This hand out addresses how feelings are physical sensations and how these can be expressed, moved, and addressed in healthy ways like mentioned above.
This is an invitation to create your own circle of what you can control in these times, feel free to use these suggestions and what you can’t control to put in on the outside. This visual art exercise can provide perspective and grounding. There are things we CAN do and BE.
Tool for the spirit: YOU ARE MY BELOVED
Perhaps these words sound familiar, they were said to Jesus in His baptism, perhaps we have felt them as ours before: you are my beloved…
Maybe we have heard them many times before, but maybe they don’t taste like anything anymore. How could we be beloved when we are undergoing suffering? Illness? Isolation? Depression? grief, confusion and so many other feelings and situations that these times bring up? Ultimately the question is does being God’s beloved make us immune to suffering? No. Bad things do happen to good people, all social classes, genders, races, and groups are being affected, so how does being or knowing that we are beloved change how we respond to these times?
Love and suffering do not exclude each other. In my prayer these days I turn to theologian: John Stott:
"I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?... I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged into God forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh, blood, tears and death. He suffered for us”
He also suffers with us.
Some people look at the cross and feel guilty because He suffered so much so that suffering wouldn’t have the last word in our lives but I look at the cross and feel consolation: I am not alone! God not only knows my suffering, He alone can help me transcend it. He resurrected. Suffering does not have the last word, resurrection does.
We can’t do this on our own y’all.
So, some spiritual tool suggestions:
- Eat Jesus in the Eucharist. We are what we eat.
- Reach out to Mama Mary: no one knows how to be by the cross better than Mary. The rosary is our umbilical chord.
- A simple: Jesus, I trust in you is a super amazing quick way of acknowledging that you are not God but God’s child.
- Stay connected. We journey with you.
