Steering towards a place of well-being, being, and staying there, in the trouble, in the loneliness, in the depths of what-ever-tidal-flows-foaming-over-me, reading, listening, pausing, sleeping, talking, waiting, enduring or caring for someone. Someone said recently that this is the Era of the mind, an era of societal transformation not so much through technological leaps as through the mind. I interpreted it as a spiritual era, maybe because it was a piece of information coming from a spiritually-minded mindfulness friend of mine.
Staying at home has offered a new or at least broader, more time-less space for studying and learning, not being confronted with sensibilities or occasional incidents of social confrontation or errands in the outside world; this has brought about millions of small cells/worlds around the world with little mind-worlds of reflection, calmness, worries, mental disaster, and other states of mental configuration. Less confrontation, more mind time.
Caribic Care is a resource for health and wellbeing methods, originating from the kunstverein and artist residency Caribic Residency. They have collected a resourceful archive of resources for people who need assistance in self-help in 2020. Helping Yourself 2020 is a handy little guide to seek help for self-help from the minds of others, in this case a list of artists offering a set of ideas and reflections, embodied in video, text, sounds, instructions. The works are not all new, but the collection of materials is. But, after all, even though we were not trained in dealing with and living through a pandemic, and the fact that it’s not a skill we have suddenly learned and permanently added to the evolutionary survival string of the human DNA (I dare say), I guess they touch upon universal feelings of living, breathing, relaxing, moving the body, feeling backpain, pondering on learning and unlearning, healing, eating, sleeping, scrolling, discussing milk and cheese and fluid bodies, connecting to pain and let it move away, and much more.
What’s in your private library of self-help material and tools in these times of ebb-but-mostly-flow?
Stefanos Mandrake: “Don’t forget to love yourself”
Blog post by Cecilie Jørck, Founder of Center For New Meaning | October 2020
