From November, 2015
There is Magic in the World: Mindful Play, Making Things, Anne Hamilton and the Columbus Art Museum
“For the record, woohoo! Not just art, but life- magic.”
– Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun
I am just learning how to play again; how to make life magical. How to find the silky seedlings in dried out pods while walking and then set them free in the wind one by one.
How to grab hand-fulls of leaves and smoosh them into my face before tossing them high into the air and watching them fall.
How to whisper stories to trees while I press my hand to the rough bark and listen for an answer. (See The Silent Friends video).
It is good learning.
This last week my husband Jamey and I took Sawyer (our five-year-old) to see the Lego exhibit at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Practice for Finding Inner Guidance: Journaling and Lectio Divina
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
― Rumi
Lectio Divina, or “divine reading” is traditionally a form of contemplative practice from the Christian faith tradition where one studies scripture seeking messages from God.
Today, it can also be used as a contemplative practice where one meditates on a text of choice, often times a poem, seeking individual connections and meanings.
Fasting Day: Cultivating Hunger Awareness as Thanksgiving
It is 3:53 am on Thanksgiving day. I have been up since 3:30, but I also shut off my bedroom light at around 8:15, so I guess I have had a solid night’s sleep- not that I have been doing any clock watching.
It has been 32 hours since I have had anything but water and hot tea. I am mostly over the hump now. Around 5:00 yesterday I started getting a headache, followed by body pain and general lethargy, but now I feel fine.
“Read Me And I Will…” And Other New Features
The website and blog here at Learning Lab have gotten a much needed facelift, so I wanted to update everyone on some of the new features:
1. In the “Learning Labs” tab, there are updated pages for the Learning Lab workshops.
Q and A from St. Francis DeSales Mindful Creativity Workshop
I hosted a Mindful Creativity Workshop for St. Francis DeSales High School staff a few weeks ago. Here are some photos and a responses to questions teachers asked in the workshop.
How do we make those spaces in our brain happen more often?
Brains are never going to be completely silent. Their jobs are to think, so those thoughts will just keep coming. I do find that my brain tells me fewer stories since I have been practicing for awhile, but what is more important than this is to “get distance” from thoughts. To know thoughts are not you. You don’t have to believe them. This will naturally create more “space” in our brains, because we won’t be feeding our thoughts as often. We will see that they are simply passing through.
Beautiful Moments: Rainbows, New Notebooks and Pumpkin Donuts
Opening the first page of a new notebook,
blank space soon to be filled
beginning again, pen to paper,
poised to fill the pages
Heart-Focused Breathing: Stress Reduction Strategy
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
There is something special about the heart: a miraculous, continually pumping, life-giving organ located in the center of the chest, the heart beats 100,000 pumps a day, over the course of a life that’s 2.5 billion beats (more heart facts here).
The heart also contains neurons that allow for communication with the brain. While this does not mean that the heart is a brain, there is evidence of interaction between these two parts of the body, affecting one’s health and emotional state.
When I visited Andrea Patton‘s classroom earlier this week, we used heart-focused breathing with students before moving them into a prompt where they mined their own thinking about the process via journaling.
Giving Up Conditional Love: Don Miguel Luiz on The One You Feed
I have been listening to a podcast called The One You Feed after a friend recommended it to me. In a recent episode, the host, Eric Zimmer (one of the podcast founders who also lives in Columbus, Ohio), interviewed Don Miguel Ruiz, most well known as the writer of the book Four Agreements.
While listening to the conversation, I was incredibly struck with a statement about love from Miguel Ruiz that rang true in my own human experience. It is as follows:
“We learn to love the same way that everybody else loves… the way they love us is with conditions. We can say that with 99.999 percent of humans, they love with conditions… And that’s how we love everybody, but everybody also loves us the same way. They love us if we do what they want us to do. It’s the reason we want to please everybody in the world.”
Beautiful Moments: Overcoming Fear, Remembering Love, Being Mindful of Beauty
Remembering my Rose through the words of Hafiz,
giving her beauty to the world,
feeling her light,
and her call to live without fear
Admiring the contrast in nature-
the fire of earthly splendor,
the insatiable blue of the sky
Where Art and Science Intersect: Experimentation in Color
“Fundamentally, both art and science are about encounters with the real world — the one we live in and experience as colors, textures, shapes and sounds. Every artistic creation and every scientific study is a record of experimentation. At their best those experiments are rooted in two vital qualities: interest and attention… Interest and attention allow us to live lives that are rich in meaning, lives that are passionate about noticing the everyday miracles right in front of us.”
-“Where Art and Science Meet, Exactly,” Adam Frank
My little Sawyer is a scientist. He is an artist. And he doesn’t have a problem with blending the two. Hopefully his little world will stay creative like this forever. Hopefully he never gets the message that we have to be one thing or the other. Or really one of anything, totally.
A few weeks ago, he ordered a science kit online and one of the projects was to blend colored water in test tubes. He sat in the bathtub and made his science project into an artistic expression- a temporary rainbow.
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Where do you find intersections between art and science in daily life?
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