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The first is between these two spaces in our minds - meditation and creativity.

The second is from our subconscious mind to our conscious mind.

So, in essence the first bridge leads to the second.

This will take time for some folk, especially those new to meditation. However, the intention behind the creative tags is to inspire small, gentle projects that help us on our way towards the first bridge. The most important advice I can give is not to force anything. If a tag is not inspiring you at that time just park it in case it is of any use down the line. Once you do find a tag that inspires you lean into it and let the energy around the activity speak to you in your subconscious mind. We don’t always have to know what is going on for it to be benefical.

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In recent times I have come to understand that I am in my final years of work and so I reflected on what I still wanted to achieve. I have been a teacher my entire adult life. I have been self employed since I was 38 when I retrained from performing arts to visual arts with a specialism on textile art. In recent years this has shifted to mixed media. However, that is not the whole story.

As I moved to the small Scottish island, I now call home, I became interested in Buddhism and the practice of meditation. I was fortunate enought to find a Buddhist monk mentor who wandered along with me for four years teaching me all he knew about meditaiton. I have since been teaching it face-to-face and online. During lockdown years my online community grew and I ran a couple of online retreats focused on this work with the intention of picking it up post covid.

As I enter my final years of teaching I have decided to bring the two areas of my world together and have created a space called ‘the stillness studio’. This is a virtual and phyiscal space where folk can use meditative practices to inform their creativity and vice versa. I very much hope this new space will speak to our individual sense of wellness at what is a challenging time in the wider world. Those that have been with me for sometime need not fear any loss of book arts as that is one of the cornerstones of this practice. More on that soon.

So what will this space offer and what will it feel like?

It will be -

• a quiet and gentle online space supported by the equivalent physical space (created by ourselves for ourselves)

• a space that offers regular ‘stillness studio tags’ that share small creative meditative exercises that connects us with a sense of quiet creativity in association with the natural world around us

• a space that allows members who would like to take a deeper dive that opportunity through - a cartography of our lives reflecting on positive memories from the past, celebrating the beauty of the presence and anticipating the joy of our future (more on that below)

Members can work at the stillness studio tags level and select the tags that suit them with the associated descriptors and resources list. For many this will be enough and they can create a tag library to access when suits them. However, there will likely be members that would like to delve deeper and for those I am offering the cartography of life project. This is, essentially, a journaling opportunitiy with a unique feel to it. Using mapping skills we will be recording some of our past, present and future through a journal what is supported by cartography activities.

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The divide between a lighter touch and a deep dive approach is the result of studying Substack memberships for a couple of years. The space is completely unique and I expect it to continue to evolve. However, right now it attracts a diverse range of creative beings all with different agendas and time constraints. I have been running a Patreon space for longer and, in this space, I feel there is the context for a community and so offer zooms as a main delivery strategy. Substack is different and I am not convinced that zooms are the most appropriate delivery strategy for my offerings. I don’t even turn on chat! I feel that what my membership space has offered is the opportunity to ‘wander along with me’ as we travel similar but unique creative journeys at a pace that suits us as individuals. This has proved popular within the context of a noisy, fast moving world and it has been joyful to be able to offer this here on Substack.

Reflecting on how folk behave on Substack has, thus, delivered me to this point and I hope there will be something for everyone who would like to join me? I am very excited about the tag idea and hope that they might be collectible as life long creative tools. For those with printers there is always the option of printing them off, cutting them out and making a physical library of them. My intention is to do just that but to extract the ones I am working with in any given season and hang them in my studio as a constant source of reference. I hope our library of tags will provide us with creative exercises that will achieve the following -

• a set of creative exercises that draw on the foundations of the meditative mind

• opportunity to work with the natural world to inspire and resource our creativity

• give us a focus for some creative work

• offer us a space to play

• calm our minds and create new space devoid of the white noise associated with our complex daily lives

• the ability to reach deeper within ourselves to fuel our sense of creativity and wellness

The joy is that you can collect the tags and select the ones that suit you and do them in an order that suits you. In turn, this will provide us with a sense of creative freedom.

The deeper dive into the cartography of our lives is for those that have more time and share a love of journaling. I have been journaling almost all my life beginning with small handmade nature journals I kept in a shoebox under my bed from when I was about 6 years old. I have taught different forms of journaling to include the written word, nature journaling and intuitive art journal. All of this will be included in our cartography studies. We will use maps as our guide and borrow some of their organising features such as the creation of a key and a sense of scale to create our cartography journal and my job will be to set creative exercises that support this work. As with the tags, folks can select what speaks well to them and also bank ideas for use in the future. The result of all of this planning is that members can dive as deep as suits them.

Delivery of all of this will be through blogs and vlogs as is my usual Substack delivery supported by regular digital downloads. These downloads will, of course, include the tags which will always be accompanied by contextual information that, I hope, will make the activities accessible. In addition though I will be publishing wee creative booklets underpinned by my grasp of the meditative mind for those that would find that useful and engaging in the cartography of life project. It may be, for some, that these books are stored virtually and/or physically for use at a later time in life when time allows. The cartography of life project will have a slower, more exended pace than the tags and perhaps some folk will move between the two as suits them. I hope you can see that I have taken my reflections on the folk that hang out on Substack into account when planning this new space?

I hope I have conveyed this new space well enough and I, very much, look forward to wandering along with those interested in using their creativity as a tool to reach a meditative space. For some, accessing the meditative mind can be quite challening and, over the years, I have realised how useful creative exercises can be in creating a doorway to pass through. The other side of that doorway is a part of the mind that resides in the subconscious and it is a space where we can let go and breath wellness into our inner being. Meditation is a powerful tool in our toolkit for life and I am very confident that the stillness studio can deliver a space where we might all focus on our increasing sense of wellness.

I am gently opening the door now. I have a brand new section on my Seasonal Creativity home page for the stillness studio and I will keep the book arts tab in the top menu up as archive available to existing and new paid members - I hope that is helpful. You can expect the first tag later this week and, once new members are settled in, I will begin the life cartography project.

May we find creativity and peace all bundled up with a sense of wellness.

Many thanks,

Fiona xx

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About the author

I am a mixed media artist living on the Isle of Arran in Scotland. Here on Substack I write free content weekly focusing on seasonal creativity. I also run a paid subscription and as I write this I am about to open a new doorway. Through the other side will be a quiet, gentle space that will focus on the relationship between creativity and the meditative mind. The Stillness Studio will bring together my two teaching areas into one place and we shall wander along together working on creative tasks that speak well to the meditative mind. This, in turn, speaks well to our sense of physical and mental wellness.