By Abbi Zepeda, CityHeART Art from Ashes Intern
A little known fact about me is that – along with being a writer and creative – I have spent much of my career as a childcare worker. This is a fact that is rarely relevant to the “other side” of my professional life – two sides that seldom intersect with each other seemingly split down the middle of my identity.
All of this to preface a moment of reflection with you all – introducing a part of my life I tend not to talk about on CityHeART radio – in hopes of inspiring similar reflections within you all. Recently – as part of my job as a childcare provider – I attended a series of training sessions designed to improve our skills in the classroom.
These training sessions tend to be pretty repetitive – reviewing skills on how to talk to the children and support them in their development – but this time around there was a session that stuck out to me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. It was an empathy workshop, a crash-course on how to convey empathy when in conversation with other people.
It seemed like a simple enough exercise when it was described to us, but by the end of it nearly every single one of my coworkers was in tears – including myself. At the moment it was easy to all wipe our eyes and shuffle along to the next task awkwardly – cracking jokes at our expense and moving along from the emotional vulnerability we experienced – but after the fact, it sparked a sort of internal investigation within me. I wanted to understand a bit more about the reaction and, at the very least, what emotional triggers had spurred me to that emotional response.
I wanted to share this moment with you all as a kind of explainer as to why I brought the topic of reflection to you all in the recent Moment in Between, giving a glimpse into what reflection can be used to explore. I chose to journal about this moment – as one of the reflective exercises discussed on the radio – but I also wanted to explore the artistic potential that comes linked with the idea of engaging in more structured moments of reflection.
For that exploration, I chose to engage in the art of collage making – and I found that it opened up a new avenue for me to explore exactly which emotions I was feeling in the moment. It almost heightened the journaling experience for me – bringing me to a new level of personal understanding and emotional awareness. I titled the piece “A Reflection on Empathy” – and I hope that this sparks a desire to engage in reflective creativity within anyone who may read this.
As always, I invite you to share your experiences with me about your experiences with these sorts of wellness exercises – and if you would like those experiences to be featured on CityHeART radio during Moment in Between you can contact me at abbigale@ourcityheart.org
