By Margaux Ellis – Founder, HealScapes
Kindness has been like a golden thread through my life. Woven through my upbringing. Time spent simply with my Grandparents, tending the garden, wandering the beach, and making things with our hands. Grounding my approach to life, where being human, connected to yourself and others through nature and creativity, is of the utmost importance.
As I grew up and navigated adulthood, I learned a lot about life’s harshness and complexities. With experiences in grief, deep loss, life-threatening illness, bullying and cruelty. Still, I returned to that thread of kindness for myself and others. Not always easily, and not always with softness, kindness is often incredibly strong. Accepting people as whole humans, with all the difficulties, doubts, and worries they carry. But also valuing the innate creativity, wisdom, joy, and fun in each of us.
Alongside my technical training, I have also learned from yoga, meditation, gratitude practices, and Buddhist principles. And I work in deep personal healing, knowing all the parts of myself so I can offer my best self in service of others. All to make heart-led offerings that are HealScapes. Now, with a growing range of offerings, but always with the connecting thread: kindness.
Through my work as a Landscape Architect, I empower clients with a plan. A design plan grown from listening and collaboration, bringing their vision together with refinement and meaning. I create gardens and spaces that enrich their lives, wellbeing, and memories. HealScapes is short for Healing Landscapes.
Through the ancient Japanese wisdom of Shinrin Yoku, or Forest Bathing, I share another form of landscape healing. Gentle guided walking in nature and sensory activities. A soothing, meditative practice to find grounding, calm, and immersion in the forest’s beneficial chemicals and bacteria that support our immunity and mood.
Then there is art: making, expressing. I believe we’re all creative. And that it is not for being ‘good’ at it. To me, creating is for enjoyment, exploration, and fun. And, funnily enough, when we learn to let go of being good at it or worrying about the outcome, something really interesting or even ‘good ’ starts to appear.
By making, painting, writing, doodling, drawing, designing, and doing it repeatedly, you learn and feel through the process, not just the best way to experience creativity. But to become ‘good’, if that is your goal. I offer Creative Workshops designed to help people let go of what has stopped them from creating and see that the whole point might just be to be creative, purely as a type of kindness for yourself.
I’ve returned to my own art practice with kindness. I was so immersed in it as a teenager, but life pushed me to the edges for other priorities. Now, I’m back to playing, too. Seeing where the paint layers take me, working more with prompts that get the paint moving and the marks making, working on not holding myself back with my mind. Letting the making process build toward an outcome instead.
It is fun and freeing, and I think that is the kind of kindness we need more of in life. I have a dance project in the works where the whole goal is moving your body without being self-conscious or performing, just for the joy of it!
So, check out HealScapes website and socials to find out more about weaving a little more kindness through your life – by connecting to nature, creativity and yourself.
By Margaux Ellis – Founder, HealScapes
Phone: 0493 766 064