Live In Your Hands: An Invitation to Creative Embodiment

In the past month, I have become obsessed with hand-spinning yarn from wool. Among the many satisfactions of this new art-form, perhaps the most distinct is simply the deep pleasure of using my hands to make something beautiful and real.

Many of you probably know what I mean here. In our tech-heavy world, our hands are often reduced to rigid implements of key-tapping, phone-holding, and button-pushing. They become our means of checking off tasks, not the instruments of connection with the living world that they long to be. And because so many of our tasks often involve the manipulation of a screen - of a world that isn't actually, physically there - our hands can become profoundly bored. And when our hands feel bored, our whole life can start to feel bored.

Our hands want to make things; they want to invest in the world. They want to touch and experience and express. They want to feel that they matter. When we infuse our hands with awareness in some act of purposeful creation, we become real to ourselves again. In a culture and era in which so much un-reals us, this can be a tremendously powerful act. Whether we choose to dig a flowerbed, or model clay, or bake bread, or braid our child's hair, consciously inhabiting our hands as we pour some act of love and creation into the world can bring us back into our wholeness and aliveness.

For many people, hands are also a safe and gentle portal into embodiment. As our primary instruments of touch, our hands are a wise messenger between inner and outer experience. Because they're used to inhabiting this threshold, they can often be a gentle and friendly introduction to going within; knowing how to keep in touch with both worlds can make it easier to connect inside without feeling overwhelmed or flooded. For many, this makes the hands a wonderful companion into embodiment.

In the coming weeks, I invite you to give some attention to your hands. Ask them what they want, how they would like to live, how they would like to spend their time, what they know that maybe you have forgotten. You may be surprised and enlivened by their answers. Live into your hands, use them, touch real, organic things with them, infuse them with awareness, and see what it is they have to share.

Here's to a month you can put your hands around.