Mindful Making
Hello all! I’m travelling at the moment and recording good quality audio is not so easy. I’ll come back and record the audio version of this post in a few weeks. For now, you will have to “make do” with the written version :)
A few weeks ago I attended a fabulous felting workshop. I was a student rather than the teacher, and I relished stepping back to the other side of the metaphorical desk for a change. The class had a joint billing. The making part was led by a friend, Nancy, who is a world renowned expert in her field. Her business, Treetops Colour Harmonies, dyes and sells materials for felting and textile art, and her colours are simply glorious. I’ve got a box full of her delicious fabrics and fibres, but I had never done a class with her before. I absolutely loved it. Nancy is generous, passionate, kind, encouraging, and so knowledgeable - the very best kind of creative teacher.
The second part of the workshop was an hour of meditation at the end of the day. I’ve done meditation classes before, but never as an explicit component of a craft workshop. Conceptually, the idea was a good one, but in practice it failed to hit the mark, at least for me. The craft workshop had been mentally and physically demanding. In order to fit everything in, we had to rush through a bit of stitching at the end so we could move upstairs to the meditation room.
I could tell straight away that our lovely guide knew she had a difficult group to deal with. We were all tired and I for one, just wasn’t in the right head space to sit on a cushion chanting and singing. I had been far more relaxed and mindful a few hours earlier as I rhythmically rolled my developing felt backwards and forwards. As I tried to follow the script set before me, I couldn’t help thinking that I would have been far happier if I could have spent that last hour of the day continuing with the stitching we had only just started, letting the rhythm of needle and thread weave their magic on me. Please don’t get me wrong - this was absolutely not the fault of our guide. In the right circumstances, I would have been more than happy to settle down and focus on her meditation class. My discomfort stemmed from the implied suggestion that after such a wonderful day of mindful felting and stitching, we needed some extra meditation to “wind down”.
Rhythmically rolling felt - a wonderfully simple form of mindful making
So I’ve been musing on the connection between mindfulness and making. As so often happens, I’ve found some interesting reading material to further the discussion. In particular, I came across this recent book, “Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It”, by Ethan Kross. Ethan is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist who has focussed his research on understanding the process of human introspection. His definition of the latter is “actively paying attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings. The ability to do this is what allows us to imagine, remember, reflect, and then use these reveries to problem solve, innovate, and create.” Chatter is what happens when this process of introspection runs off course. In Ethan’s words, it “consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing.”
The book runs through a range of strategies to help control or redirect that internal chatter. As part of his discussion, Ethan alludes to the particular fascination we have with mindfulness in the 21st century - an exhortation to “live in the present”. But in a very interesting take on the topic, he notes that we are not biologically predisposed to this style of thinking and quotes research that shows we “spend one-third to one-half of our waking life not living in the present.” This makes sense when you stop to analyse it. We process our lives and our self understanding by reflecting on past experiences, turning them into stories, and sharing them. When we are learning, we draw on past knowledge and integrate it with the new. When we look to our future, we automatically reflect on and integrate our previous experience as we make choices and decisions.
Given Ethan’s take on mindfulness, his strategies for taming the chatter are largely directed at changing the way you interact with your internal voice. As a simple example, you can treat the voice as a third person, thus putting some distance between yourself and the words running round in your head. What doesn’t exist anywhere in the book is a reference to quieting the chatter by doing something, making something, working creatively with your hands. I can’t help wondering why?
I feel sure that many of you reading this post have experienced the calming effect of picking up your knitting, or sitting at the potters wheel, or working in the garden. I consider all these activities to be a form of practical mindfulness. Focussing on a creative task brings you into the present naturally. On a personal note, I spent many years grappling with chatter - low level, constantly present anxiety. Whilst I had made things all my life, it hadn’t been a daily practice, especially in the early years of child rearing where the chatter was not only related to worries about my own health, but now ramped up to include the health of my children. When I started my embroidery business, everything changed. I tried to work on my stitching every day and I soon noticed that whilst I was stitching and creating, the internal voices went quiet. The simple rhythm of working with needle and thread was a powerful remedy. Furthermore, the more I did it, the less likely the chatter was to resume in the periods when I wasn’t stitching. I’ve come to understand for myself that if I go a few days without stitching, the anxiety spiral starts to arc up again. I not only love to stitch - I need to stitch for my own sanity (and the comfort of those who live with me!).
This is what keeps me sane!
So, why would a superb book that has been published to rave reviews and 4.5 stars from over 1500 ratings on Amazon, have not a single word about working with our hands, or making, or creativity as a method for quieting problematic thought spirals in our head? I don’t have the answer to that. Perhaps it’s a classic case of the way modern science and research tends to stream into narrow areas of specialisation. Psychology is the science of the mind, and thus its experts naturally investigate ways to use our mind to quiet the chatter. Or maybe it’s because studying the health benefits of making is difficult because the outcomes are not clearly measurable. There have been several large scale studies reported (for example, Riley et al., 2013) but as far as I can tell, they mostly rely on self-reported improvements in mental health rather than measured outcomes.
Perhaps too there is the age-old problem of perception. If you have experienced the positive mental health benefits of a regular creative, making practice then you are already a believer. If you haven’t, then picking up some stitching or turning your hand to woodwork might sound like a whole lot of woo-woo rubbish, especially if you have grown up in an environment where these types of activities are looked down on as a fruitless waste of time.
I am very much in the camp of the believers. When my hands are busy stitching, the chatter in my head calms down. Ruminations about the past and worries about the future take a back seat to simply enjoying the rhythm of my needle and thread. It’s one of the main reasons why my creative practice is so strongly driven by process (or the journey) rather than product (or the destination). Sometimes I just want to stitch the same stitch over and over again, and watch the colours play out beneath my fingers. At other times, I love playing with different stitch combinations to develop a new geometric layout. As Jacob Nordby writes in his book, “The Creative Cure”, “meditation can take any number of forms. It's not just about sitting silently in a room.” For me, it’s about engaging with my craft completely and letting the rest of the world melt away for a while.
I recognise though that I have been stitching for a very long time. It’s so much a part of me that I can’t imagine my life without it. For someone who has yet to find the creative process that offers these mental health benefits, it’s not such an easy go-to solution. Finding the confidence to explore and develop your own creative practice is not always straightforward. You need to find the activity that feels right, turn off the voices of judgement (both internal and external!), invest enough time going through the learning curve for it to start to feel comfortable, and then start to experience that joyful, happy complete feeling that comes from focussing totally on something that you love.
As a teacher of embroidery, I’m privileged to be a small part of this journey with many of my students. Part of my dream with The Hands Manifesto is to encourage a much wider audience to find their way to a creative path that brings them the practical, mindful health benefits that I know from personal experience can make such a powerful difference to our everyday lives.
This Week’s References
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross (2021). Published by Ebury, Penguin Random House, UK - ISBN: 9781473559110
The Benefits of Knitting for Personal and Social Wellbeing in Adulthood: Findings from an International Survey by Riley J, Corkhill B, and Morris C (2013). Published in British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(2):50-57.
The Creative Cure: How Finding and Freeing Your Inner Artist Can Heal Your Life by Jacob Nordby. Published by Hierophant Publishing, Texas - ISBN: 9781950253043
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