Footsteps

Items Needed:

Poster Paper (white)

Coloured pens/pencils/textas/paints/paper

craft glue

scissors

magazines (that you are willing to cut pictures out)

anything else you can think of

Exercise:

In barefeet, stand on your poster paper and trace around each foot.

More or less, your left foot and left side of the poster represents the past, and the right foot/right side will represent the future.

So to begin with, think of something in your childhood that made you happy (e.g. my earliest happy memory is learning to ride my bicycle without training wheels, with my dad trying to show me how)... so write that down, and then draw a flower around it and colour it in. Another happy memory of mine, is seeing the fireworks each year as a child at the Royal Melbourne Show.

Alternatively, you can do this on a piece of coloured paper, draw your flower, write your happy memory, and cut it out and glue it onto your poster.

Keep doing this for as many memories as you wish (or as many as you can remember, which isn't as easy as it sounds).

Additionally to these, you can find pictures of things in the magazines that make you happy, or have in the past. It could be a landscape, an animal, a musical instrument. Anything!! Paste these onto your poster too. Fill as much of the poster's left hand side as you can, but leave the right side blank, as this is a progressive exercise and you can spend time in the future putting things on it that have made you happy, or adding more flower shrines to happy moments.

You could perhaps write down some things in the right side that you want in your future that will make you happy, but I don't think I will be doing this on mine (unless I find a picture that represents a very healthy Mother Earth).

It doesn't matter either if you cover up those feet you traced, as long as they are there then that's all that matters really. I think I will fill mine in with pictures but leave a bit of a border around it so you can see the outline of the foot.

Other stuff you might like to paste on are dried flowers or ribbons or whatever for decoration (as long as these things make you happy, if not only for their aesthetic value).

And if you are a bit of an artist, you could draw your own pictures on it.

"You are only limited by your imagination!"

I am fully aware also that while doing something like this, in which you are trying to go back into the past to locate happy times, that you will stumble across some not-so-happy memories. That is unavoidable... but just keep in mind the purpose of this exercise is to celebrate HAPPINESS so when you do stumble upon one of these 'speed humps', acknowledge it, and then move on

Whether doing this in a group setting or individually, you may wish to

chant together and circle as you do a spiral dance to celebrate where you are at and what you have achieved and then send the energy out to the universe to create more abundance within your lives?

Or..... at the end of the exercise you can plant some seeds that can be nurtured just like us and watch the flowers grow or plant bulbs for the spring as a group and again see the beauty within your lives blossom:)