The lockdown kept many of us at home, thereby unusually increasing our free time while we battled to think of the uncertain future. Doing manual work at home could be one sure way to stimulate your senses, by developing your creativity, removing stress and freeing your mind from unpleasant thinking.
The benefits of manual labour for the health of the body and mind
Maybe we all noticed at this particular moment of lockdown that having to spend a lot of time at home, many of us may have found manual work an incredibly beneficial relief option. Yet these are activities that we tend to set aside or neglect.
Manipulative Activities or Skills
Manipulative skill plays an essential role during a child’s growth path.
Through manipulation, children experience and know the world, and learn expressive techniques with which they express their experiences, feelings and emotions in a personal and subjective way which contributes to their growth.
But being adults, we work with our hands when we have the time and space, for example: during free time. Yet, these activities have an immediate mental response because when we have the opportunity to do manual work, we feel satisfied, energetic, and rich in resources.
Why Manual Labor is Good
All the activities that involve the use of the hands make us feel good because through the hands we shape both our creativity and our desires.
When we perform manual activities, we reconnect with parts of us because we are most times forced to concentrate, a sort of meditation and therapy for the mind.
Touching, shaping, knitting, gardening, painting, and kneading are all manual activities that stimulate the production of endorphins and reduce stress.
They are activities that allow us to relax and help us distract ourselves, and we can spend a few happy hours on these particularly dreary days, of forced isolation.
Dedicating yourself to a hobby, old or new, can improve your mood. And then we can take a cue from the various tutorials on the internet to try to do just anything.
Experimenting Something New Enhances Creativity
Seeing a seedling grow, organising knitting or making jewellery is satisfying because the perception is that something new and alive is born from your hands, through skills that you did not know that you have new experiments can suddenly inspire creativity, in which everything now appears in the light of profound and primitive joy.
Action As A Form of Meditation
We can take inspiration from the confinement of monks and nuns, and what they do with their solitary lifestyle.
Testimonies abound about the works of the scribes, who copied entire volumes of the Bible by hand with calligraphy full of decorations and colours; The gardens and outdoor work, the embroidery and candies produced in the monasteries are reminiscent of life made not only of meditation but also action.
Through our hands we shape the world and our desires, we find deep contact with our emotions to reach inner silence.
