Wellness Resources

Welcome! I created these resources in service to the youth ministry in St. Mary's Church where I work. Anyone is welcome to share them. These are tools for mental, emotional and spiritual wellness. Take what works for you!

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?

Who is one adult/other human that you can reach out at any time?

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.

Handout received from the East Bay Meditation Center.

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 and nowadays 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 with the omicron, gas prices, food prices, and the emotions ramping up through waves, I turned to theologian John Scott who wrote:

"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.

In my own personal curiosity I have searched other traditions and found no other God that would know the complete human experience as God in the humanity of Jesus. It is by uniting ourselves with Him, by clinging on to Him, by journeying with Him that we can transcend suffering, find meaning in it and and even give life and love to others from its transformation. So we are not anyone’s beloved, we are the beloved ones of a God who is fully human, fully divine.

May we know we are God’s beloved, may we believe that in the midst of everything that is going on right now.

So, some spiritual tool suggestions:

Eat Jesus in the Eucharist. Listen to Mass on youtube if you can’t come in person: https://stmary-wc.org/ we have recordings daily.
Reach out to Mama Mary: no one knows how to be by the cross better than Mary. The rosary is a huge powerful tool!
A simple: Jesus, I trust in you is a super amazing quick way of acknowledging that you are not God but God’s child.
Check out our youth ministry website with cool daily updated videos: https://stmary-wc.org/encounter-h-s-youth-ministry

Picture found online. I want to believe they are soldiers in the middle of war, receiving Him who is the source of all victories.

LASTLY: remember that we are the body of Christ and are one community. Stay connected. We will navigate together one day at a time. Feel free to contact me here for specific needs or to redirect you to resources. Hope these contributed in some way to your wellbeing.

In community,

Kiona