mental health | Samantha Humphreys

April 15, 2025

Creating Mindfulness in Nature: A Reflective Outing

This weekend, I was working alongside fellow creatives in leading some community workshops in a non residential retreat. Titled, Creative Calm, these were held on the beautiful campus at ARU Writtle. I designed short tasks using drawing, painting, and writing. These short tasks embrace the idea that mindfulness can be achieved by focusing only on the moment.

Engaging with nature is known to improve life balance. It keeps us mentally fit and promotes a positive sense of wellbeing. Walking in green spaces, forests, woods, and fields makes us feel wholesome. More importantly, it allows us to reset our busy minds when partaking at either end of the day. Being creative also holds these powers. It doesn’t matter if you are an experienced and confident artist. You can also enjoy these benefits, even if you consider your skills to lie elsewhere. The secret to unlocking the powers is understanding that we, as humans, are part of nature. We are not a separate entity. Nature is made up of living, moving, ageing and ever-changing matter. We are just that.

Last week was filled with sad news of the passing of friends and family of friends. I chose a corner of the memorial garden on campus to create a watercolour painting. I’m unsure if that is the name of the garden. It has become a place where tributes are left in memory of those that have passed in recent years. It is also a retreat for peaceful sitting. As I studied the leaves, flowers and man made structures; I reflected, just sat and thought. I layered my painting with the subtle changes in green tone. My aim was to give it the depth and richness I wanted to achieve. I pondered (now there’s a word I don’t use often enough) on how and when we turn to nature. We use plant materials to celebrate life, whether that life is in the current, recently or long since passed. Flowers are given, wreaths or bouquets are laid or trees are planted in memorial. We become connected to nature by these acts of tenderness throughout our lives; we become memories planted firmly in those places of solace when we have moved on. This little corner of the campus is truly a wonderful place for addressing life balance and mental reset. Capturing the current through text and poetry can develop or strengthen mindful practice. It lets us close all the open tabs and hit the power down button for a short while.

My outcome from this session? Life really is too short, do what feels right and change direction if necessary. Cliched I know, but there are many paths to explore.

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January 18, 2025

Peace and Rose Gold Sky

How beautiful is this? I am so lucky that I have this on my doorstep, for now anyway. It wont be long before this walk will be alongside houses and back garden fences and maybe not such a clear view of the lilac rose gold sunrise and hazy late morning views across the fields.

I heard some lovely words the other day during a journaling for wellness class, “Whatever happens, Don’t die before you’re dead, stay alive…” After some googling, it seems as though this is a part quote from Virginia Woolf. Whether it is or not and I couldn’t find a legitimate source, it packs a punch.

Particularly as later in the day I was asked what job I wish I could have done. My answer was, without a doubt, the job i’m doing now, but I wish I had done it sooner. This of course was not taking into account that I took the route I did through life for a reason, I wouldn’t swap what I have for the world. If I had made different career choices in early adulthood I may not have the family I have now so it was only a ‘without taking all things into consideration’ answer. I also may not have been as engaged and switched on to the importance of creativity in fostering a healthy sense of wellbeing when I was younger. It was something I considered a hobby that I was good at.

Now, I like to think that every choice I have made in life has yielded a success, whether that be a small win amongst what may have seemed like a failure or a huge turning point.

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December 6, 2024

Finding My Groove

As I expected, life changed somewhat this year, I left formal education after thinking I would remain involved forever in a job I loved. I fixed some….no, most, of the necessary broken bits of my rapidly and scarily declining mental health and started to find time for dealing with what needs dealing with physically. I developed much of my art practice with new techniques throughout the year. This was mainly because of Project 366 which has forced me to allow daily time for my art and as a result, I feel as though I have practiced ‘extreme art’. The additional skills, as well as being awfully useful as I can now teach more techniques than ever, have released all manner of wonderful chemicals to my brain perfectly complementing those endorphins I get from taking long walks each day.

Additionally this year, I have learned a lot about myself and found ‘where I actually belong’ in the world. As well as being a daughter, a wife and a mum, I feel that maybe life has been like a vinyl record rather than a treadmill and I have finally found my groove. You may well laugh at my cheesy metaphor, (I did) but we tend to see life as a series of milestones, we are conditioned that way. Maybe it’s meant to be a round of possibilities that show themselves at different stages of our life and while we shouldn’t constantly flit from one thing to another : we can settle into something more than once, and we don’t have to be in just one groove forever.

Teaching how creativity can give us the tools we need to maintain a healthy wellbeing is my groove. Journaling has been crucial to developing my own sense of healthy wellbeing is something we take for granted, yet It is in fact a provision we must make for ourselves and it needs checking daily. As an Artist, I take it for granted that creativity is good for the soul, but not everyone sees themselves as creative so how do we encourage exploration of that? Everyone possesses creativity, maybe not in an obvious way, but we all have the ability to mark make, make creative noise or move creatively and we should allow ourselves to do this as much as we give ourselves the time to eat, work and sleep.

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February 5, 2020

Eternal Musings (working title)

Last week I took part in a drawing session at the university I teach at. The session is student led and this particular workshop involved choosing a print out from a list of well known, course relevant and extremely well chosen texts that we had to annotate in any way we pleased in a creative way.

I chose The Time Machine by H.G. Wells Pg 48-49, not a book I have read interestingly enough but the text spoke of hope for the future, new growth and a hint that humanity has not yet destroyed the earth. This, coupled with my interests in mental health, wellbeing and my desire to, indeed, save the planet. I found that I started developing Mandalas on the page.

This piece here is not my first attempt in the drawing session, the idea of the session is that you think as you draw, there is a time limit and I soon realised that I did not have the right tools with me to properly develop so I saw this as a preparation for a more developed piece.

The Mandala has many meanings culturally and in a variety of religions. My interests lay in the circular design of the Mandala, symbolising the concept that everything is connected. I am drawn to the idea of a personal design that holds meaning to the creator and can be instrumental to wellbeing. The use of the Mandala in the time machine piece speaks of both healing our environment and our mental wellbeing which has become increasingly fragile.

Once you get past the mathematical accuracy needed to create a successful Mandala (which I have not yet mastered) the process focuses the mind completely, there is no need for checking emails, social media or any other contemporary distractions that cause our brains to fill to capacity and inevitably, break down.

What if? is a question that has come up in my work before, but what if we could gather all the experts in the fields of : Sustainability, Climate crisis, Mental health and wellbeing to name a few….and using knowledge and science, go back to where we made our biggest mistakes and change it? Un-invent single use plastics and disposeable nappies and anything else clogging up the earth in landfill? Change the laws allowing young people to use social media? Not have social media at all? These are just my initial thoughts, but can you imagine? The time travel thing is just a bit of fun, what I find strange though is that despite watching a lifetime of Doctor Who and having watched time travel stories over the years-it was only when I placed the Mandalas over the text of a book I haven’t read, that I saw a connection between the mental state of humanity and the fragile state of the planet. A friend looked at the piece and she described it as eternal musings, which I think is a good description of what the piece represents.

I will be doing more research and developing this idea….

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April 13, 2018

I am in a Room…

I am in a room. The room is a small part of something much bigger, it feels very comfortless. I am overwhelmed for a moment and need to sit down, there is a sense of loss. I feel the mind mutations minute by minute. I feel inspired, then those feelings are squashed by the imposed limitations. All in the space of a minute.

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Tag: mental health