Regardless of circumstance, stressful situations can be challenging on many levels.  Fortunately there are many simple breath-related practices we can engage with to help initiate relaxation and re-connect us with innate wisdom, courage, and care. ​

My family finally got around to seeing Disney’s new fantasty/sci-fi adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time in the theater.  Our girls were taken by the cinematic grandeur, all of the sparkles, and of course, the many main characters of color on the screen.  Given our youngest daughter is convinced she is going to be a fashion designer/inventor of the first smart device with teleporting capabilities, this movie was a perfect spark for her imagination.  

The story follows the family of a NASA scientist who discovers the ability to warp time and space with his consciousness and travel billions of light years through the universe.  By attuning with the vibratory frequency of love, he enables his discovery, the phenomenon of a universal “tesseract”, to manipulate sound and light waves. This creates an opening in the fabric of the time-space continuum, allowing him to “tesser” to other planets. 

Unfortunately, the father gets stuck in a dark corner of the universe, and his children set off on a journey to help him get home. Without giving too much away, the children finally learn that to break free from the evil planet holding him captive and “tesser” back home, they need to tap their red glittery slippers together and…. Oh wait – oops, wrong movie!

Back to A Wrinkle in Time – to get back to Earth, the main characters are challenged to be warriors for light and peace by: (1) feeling the “one-ness” of the universe while remaining true to their unique diverse qualities; (2) courageously confronting their darkness while staying connected to light; and (3) letting go of all resistance while vibrantly resonating with the innate frequency of love.  

Though the ambitious movie is not without its own faults, its main message to young viewers of loving compassion for self and others is inspiring.  In theory, the concepts sound good, but how does a kid exactly “align with the right frequency”, trust that “love is always there, even if you don’t feel it”, or recognize that it “isn’t gone; it’s just unfolded,” as the movie suggests?  Perhaps it all starts with cultivating a relationship with love…

I recently was asked to look into the links between meditation and creativity for an article in Spirituality & Health Magazine and thought I’d share here. 
 
As the number of studies looking at the health and cognitive impacts of meditation keeps increasing, there have been a few very small studies looking at the effect of meditation practices on creativity.  An interesting study amongst nineteen healthy adults in Netherlands published in 2012 compared the impact of focused-attention (FA) meditation and open-monitoring (OM) meditation on creativity tasks. ​