meditation – Soil to Stars

Big Feelings & Meditation – Sat Nam

May 5, 2025Uncategorized

I was speaking with a friend today about the experience of meditating and the bubbling up of the big feelings that often happens and can be deeply unsettling during a moment where you had perhaps hoped or expected to be doing the opposite.

As I was driving home after that conversation, I noticed, as I so often do while driving, feelings that emerged from the periphery. I love that about long drives, where the open road stretches out to meet the horizon. My mind has space to release into the enormity of thoughts, feelings or situations that perhaps seemed too much to begin unpicking.

An image will drop in, answering a question that I couldn’t find an answer for, and then the pieces will fall together and solve a puzzle I couldn’t, in my conscious, conditioned mind begin to comprehend.

Meditation is a way to prime that pump. It is building a muscle of both space and stability.

Sometimes priming this pump hurts, like the first few moments of a hike, your muscles respond with cries of “what do you think your doing to me” only to be humming with “that feels great, why don’t we do this more often” by the end.

And the journey is a constant returning to the path, which leads inside, with gentle kindness.

The power of mantra is a method to gently replace the thoughts of every day with another vibration. Sat Nam is the Sanskrit for “I AM” and more accurately “I AM TRUTH”.

So I offer this meditation to you as a reminder of your own unique, boundless and beautiful truth.

Sat Nam.

The Story of the Book Bag

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024Uncategorized

I have been making book bags. Not because I think this is a product that the world needs. The world doesn’t need any more products. We have enough. I’ve been making book bags because I’ve been coming back into relationship with reading. And beginning to notice what a critical skill it is for my mental health.

Those two words, mental health were not something I grew up with. Its taken me many many years to allow them to hold any validity for me. I would hear those words and think of the younger generation as frail, soft, unable to have an innate sense of resilience. But the longer I have sat with it, the more I am coming to realise that this new generation are asking for something else. They are demanding more than just shutting up and putting up. And in asking, they are giving permission to those of us who were not raised with any or at least very little awareness of mental health to begin prioritising it.

What my generation (kids of the 80s) did get was a world without the internet. We had screens. My Popa would lament at the hours I would sit glued to cartoons, so I can’t say we didn’t have screens. But we didn’t have the internet and we had the generation of adults like my grandparents who knew the value of sitting around a table and sharing stories.

For 20 years now I have made and sold creations and art and I am constantly questioning why. What is it for? Who is it for? How do we liberate ourselves from a capitalist society when we are so entirely emmersied in it? How do we create and make and celebrate and ritualise our culture for connection and not simply competition. Where is the balance?

At the end of the day, it is for me. Making things keeps me sane – to create, to use my hands, to see an idea come into a form.

Two things have been constant companions for restoring my mental health these past couple of years since the massive transition that we all faced in the Summer of 2019/20 and are continuing to move through – cooking and reading.

Cooking and reading became my meditation.

The Book Bag is a celebration of that connection.

Watch this space for a new character in the story to emerge soon.

Sending love

Sarah

Birds on a Wire

April 28, 2015June 6, 2017Blog

Last week I sat down for a morning meditation and looking out the window noticed a group of birds on the electrical wires outside. As they moved about amongst themselves, some coming and some going, they began to resemble the notes on a page of music. I filmed them to later translate their movement into a composition and while sitting down to view the footage at the piano was struck by how fleeting a moment in time and particular combination of elements (be they family, friends, feelings) are. The void that was left as one bird flew off, left a space for something new to emerge and the various connections and disconnections as they jumped from one wire to the next released the monotony that would have ensued if they had sat still and isolated in their own little world. Now each time I look up at birds on the wires and wonder – what music are you creating up there?