Make Space
An introduction
There is a particular kind of difficulty that has no name yet.
Not grief — you know grief, the way it hollows out a room. Not anxiety — you know that too, the wire pulled taut behind the breastbone. Something more like the weather that comes before either: a low pressure in the chest, a heaviness with no clear edge, the sense of a body waiting for conditions that have not yet arrived. You have felt it. You have probably felt it many times, on ordinary afternoons, and had no idea what to do with your hands while it moved through you.
Most of what is offered to you — the productivity systems, the self-care scripts, the therapeutic models — is built for feelings that already have names. They ask you to identify what you are feeling and then apply the correct response. But the feelings that most need your attention are often the ones that refuse to be identified. The ones that arrive before language does, and leave again before you have found the word.
This is what Make Space is for.
What this is
Make Space: Other Bodies and Creative Health is a fifty-two-week investigation built around a single working hypothesis: that something we might call creative health grows when a person makes without a goal — inside a structure that keeps the natural world close, as a companion for human feeling.
It is not a course, not really. There are no grades, no right answers, nothing to complete. It is closer to a piece of research conducted from the inside. Each week asks you to notice something, sit with something, and then make something — not to arrive at a result, but to find out what the making already knows that you don’t yet.
The medium at the centre of the practice is watercolour. Because it will not be controlled. It pools where it was not invited. It bleeds past the line you drew for it. It dries three shades lighter than it looked when it was wet, so that the thing you thought you had made is not quite the thing waiting for you in the morning. Learning to stay with what the paint does, instead of correcting it, turns out to be a strangely exact rehearsal for staying with a feeling that is doing the same thing: going somewhere you did not plan, refusing to behave, asking to be kept company rather than fixed.
You do not need to be an artist. You do not need a finished piece, a clean table, or any particular readiness. You need a body — which you already have — and a willingness to begin. That is the whole threshold.
What “Other Bodies” means
Here is the claim at the centre of the project, said plainly: natural bodies are not symbols. They are sites of wisdom.
The octopus has been living something close to shame — a skin that reads the room faster than thought, a whole body that changes in answer to being seen — for hundreds of millions of years. Permafrost has been practising something close to numbness — a patient keeping, a suspension of what cannot yet be released — across spans of time the mind can barely hold. Lichen has been living what we call relational complexity — two organisms grown so far into each other that the border between them has stopped meaning anything — since long before there were animals on land at all.
These are not metaphors, and the difference matters. The claim is not that the octopus reminds us of shame. It is that the octopus has been doing something structurally like shame for far longer than there have been humans to feel it — and that when you sit with what it actually does, the colour moving across its skin, the body answering its surroundings without deciding to, your own version of the feeling becomes easier to hold. Not easier to solve. Easier to be with. The difference between those two is the whole point.
Fifty-two feelings are mapped across the year, gathered into constellations: Protective States, Heavy States, Relational States, Expansive States, Complex States, Threshold States. Each week sets one feeling beside one natural body and one small act of making. You are the one investigating. The making is the data.
How the curriculum is structured
The fifty-two weeks move through four phases.
Foundations (Weeks 1–13) lays the ground. What creative health is, and what it isn’t. What makes a studio — which turns out not to be a room but a state of readiness you can build almost anywhere, on a kitchen table, on the floor. What watercolour has to teach about working with a material that will not cooperate. Why making without a goal is at once the hardest thing to practise and the most useful. These weeks are meant to be returned to.
Literature (Weeks 14–26) asks what research, history, and theory can tell us about why any of this might work. The science of creative engagement. The psychology of flow, and what it actually asks of a person. The case for creative health as something a society might choose to offer on purpose — and the honest limits of that case. This is where the project takes its own hypothesis seriously enough to ask where the evidence is strong, where it is only suggestive, and where it is not yet there at all. The field is real and growing — the World Health Organization has gathered hundreds of studies on the arts and health; in some places a clinician can now prescribe creative practice the way they prescribe exercise — and it is also young, and parts of it are thinner than its enthusiasts would like. Both of those things are true, and this phase tries to hold them together.
Investigation (Weeks 27–48) is the living case study — twenty-two weeks of working through the Other Bodies constellations, one feeling at a time. This is where the practice goes deep. The octopus. The cave. The glacier. The fog. Each one a body that has been practising something far longer than we have had a name for it.
Synthesis (Weeks 49–52) gathers what has been learned and turns it outward. How does a private practice become part of something larger? What has the making taught about being a person? What stays unresolved — and what does it ask of us to stay with the unresolved instead of forcing it closed?
Each week arrives in two parts. The first is the grounding — what the field knows, what the natural body carries, what the feeling asks of you. The second is the practice — a creative act, a video, a prompt to bring to others, and a question left open.
How to arrive each week
Every session begins the same way, whatever week you are in, whatever the natural body is.
Before you touch any materials: feel the weight of your body in the chair or on the floor. Feel your breath arrive and leave. Name one thing your body is carrying right now — not to fix it, only to know that it is there. This is the somatic check-in, and it is not a warm-up. It is the first act of the work. The body already knows something about what this session is for. The check-in is only the act of listening before you begin.
Then you make. Not toward an outcome. Toward honesty.
When the session ends, check in again. What has moved? What does the body know now that it didn’t twenty minutes ago? You do not have to share what you made. You do not have to decide whether it is any good. Those are different questions from the one the practice is asking.
What you need
Watercolour paper, or any absorbent surface
A small set of watercolours, or watercolour pencils, or whatever fluid pigment you have access to
Water
A brush or a piece of card or tissue
Somewhere to be undisturbed for twenty to forty minutes
Every set of instructions is a starting point, not a prescription. Adapt freely. The practice will meet you where you are.
A word about the hypothesis
Make Space is not a finished argument. It is an investigation in progress, carried out in public, by someone still in the middle of it.
The hypothesis is this: that what we make without a goal — in the company of natural bodies, with a medium that resists our hand — can teach us something about emotional capacity that more goal-directed approaches tend to miss. That the difficult, un-nameable feeling has information inside it. That sitting with a natural body long enough, out of genuine curiosity rather than the wish to extract a lesson, can make that information available in a form the body can actually receive.
It might be wrong. Or it might be true only sometimes, for some people, in ways that are hard to measure and easy to overstate. I want to hold that possibility honestly rather than write around it, because a practice that can only survive by avoiding its own doubt is not one worth fifty-two weeks of anyone’s life. What I can say is that something happens at the table that I have not yet found a better account of. The next year is for finding out what that something is — and whether it is what I think it is.
You are not here to receive a conclusion. You are here to help find one.
Gratitude and intellectual ground
This curriculum was made possible by Shauna Kaendo, Registered Canadian Art Therapist, whose creative care practice taught me that making things together is a form of healing. Shauna’s work — rooted in anti-oppression, somatic awareness, and the conviction that personal healing is inseparable from collective healing — is the ground this whole project grows from. The ohHEY Creative Care Community, the practice of making without a goal, the belief that a body and a willingness to begin is threshold enough: all of it begins with her.
The Other Bodies framework — the idea that human bodies and more-than-human bodies are both sites of wisdom, that emotional states can be held and understood through an intimate relationship with the land — was deepened by the work of Care at Erotics of Liberation. Their eco-somatic framework gave this project a language for bodies, human and more-than-human, as places where liberation is felt and practised. That language lives inside every pairing in this curriculum.
The curriculum also grows from scholarship in Black liberation somatics, which it is important to name clearly, because this work did not emerge from nowhere.
Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies is the groundbreaking text on racialized trauma and body-centered psychology that underpins the curriculum’s understanding of what the body carries, and of how embodied practice — not just insight — is where healing happens.
Michelle Cassandra Johnson’s Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World is a foundational text in embodied anti-racism and justice-centered practice. Her work as a somatics educator and somatic abolitionist shapes how this curriculum understands the relationship between individual practice and collective liberation.
tayla shanaye’s work — including Locate Your Liberate and Nourishing the Nervous System — brings Black feminist somatic practice, neuroscience, and Black maternal liberation into direct conversation. Her scholarship is part of the intellectual ground this curriculum draws from when it makes claims about the body, emotion, and what practice makes possible.