Hey Y’all! We’re back in your feed on April 2nd with a new episode of The Slice. Today we’re sharing Meditate & Create. Starting next month, this series will be available exclusively for Paid Subscribers. All episodes of The Slice will remain free for all subscribers. Speaking of, have you shared our episode with Jessamine Chan so your friends can enter our giveaway?
What is Meditate & Create?
Meditate & Create is a monthly at-home retreat containing a guided meditation created by Michelle and an at-home art activity created by Jen.
Why do we offer Meditate & Create? We believe everyone deserves to take time for themselves, but that time shouldn’t be spent figuring out what to. Meditate & Create is a pre-packaged self-care activity that can be done in under an hour.
You can enjoy Meditate & Create on your own or with a small group of friends. Paid subscriptions are $40/year. They make a great mother’s day gift!
For this month’s Meditate & Create, we’ll be making an emotions wheel following your meditation. Scroll to the instructions for the activity below. We suggest you create the emotions wheel after you listen to the guided meditation. This meditation and activity may also be suitable to do with your kids.
What is The Wheel of Emotions?
The Wheel of Emotions is a model developed by psychologist Dr. Robert Plutchik. Dr. Plutchik explains that emotion “is a complex chain of loosely connected events that begins with a stimulus and includes feelings, psychological changes, impulses to action and specific, goal-driven behavior.” Our feelings are a kind of survival instinct. Emotions are how we manage what happens to us and how we regulate ourselves in our environment. For example, “anger helps us intimidate and therefore influence other people into doing something, or it can prepare us to attack or defend our space.”
Plutchik believed that by displaying primary emotions on a color wheel, gradations of emotions could be more easily visualized, understood, and discussed. Using color to describe emotions dates back to 1921 and is attributed to social psychologist Dr. William McDougall who wrote that “the color sensations present, like the emotions, an indefinitely great variety of qualities shading into one another” which might explain why two people may have similar but distinct feelings about a particular event.
Why use an Emotions Wheel?
The Wheel of Emotions, was suggested to me in a parenting class I took through calparents.org. In this class, the instructor suggested referring to a Wheel of Emotions to help kids name their survival instinct reaction. This kind of emotional intelligence may be especially important for young boys who—growing up in a culture of hypermasculinity, and because of distinct differences in development and brain chemistry—benefit by having the vocabulary to connect their survival-reaction-actions to words in adolescence. That teaching, I learned, begins in early childhood.
How to Create your own?
Dr. Plutchik explained that though there are hundreds of words for our emotions, his model is based on “eight bipolar emotions: joy versus sorrow, anger versus fear, acceptance versus disgust, and surprise versus expectancy.” He then mapped these words on the color wheel and added gradients of feeling between them. You might choose to start mapping these emotions on your wheel, and then fill in the spaces between emotions with words you often use to describe these states. I’m often helped by thesaurus.com which has a handy word map model where you can type in, say, the word “sad” and then see the dozen or so variations on this emotion and choose what you like.
Once you have decided on your words, assign groupings their colors, and color away. One tip, you might want to write the words in pencil first, color your wheel image, and then go back in with a felt-tip pen or thin marker and outline your penciled words.
Need a Premade Color Wheel?
Alexis Middleton of Persia Lou has some great free templates you can download and print! No email signup required to get them. Thank you Alexis! Get those templates here.
We hope that you enjoyed this installment of Meditate & Create! Update your subscription if you would like to get next month’s
This series is not meant to diagnose or treat individuals and is solely for entertainment purposes.
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BONUS EPISODE: Meditate & Create: The Rainbow Within