Crafting Our Lives: Catalyzing Minds to Create Aliveness, Resilience & Peace

Fear, worry and stress are normal responses to either a real or perceived threat. Throw in an element of uncertainty and it is a recipe for a heady mix of perpetual stress and anxiety. So it is quite normal and understandable that many people are experiencing fear in the context of the ongoing pandemic. 
 
Added to the fear of contracting the virus, there are other factors that are affecting our mental well-being - temporary unemployment, loss of pay, homeschooling, lack of social interactions with family and friends, and a complete disruption of our everyday lives. 
 
Never before in our lives have we had to pay so much attention to our mental well-being. 
 
Are you staying positive?
Are you able to cope with the current scenario and the challenges it brings?
Are you able to deal with grief, loss and stress?
 
                                                                                                        
 
Echoing this imminent need is Dr Ramya Ranganathan of Crafting Our Lives
 

What does Crafting Our Lives do?

Dr Ramya is in the business of empowering people to live joyful and more meaningful lives. 
 
To this end, she created Crafting Our Lives, which actually started as a personal journey for her to find ways to stay afloat during a particularly difficult time in her life. 
 
She shares that she was very unhappy during this phase though she had it all and ticked all the expected boxes - accomplished degrees, a successful career, a happy marriage, a loving family, a comfortable home. But she didn’t like her life. Something was amiss. 
 
‘Everything felt like a burden.I was declared clinically depressed. I didn’t know what to do and started looking at various avenues to seek help’.
 
She studied psychology, philosophy and yoga. She stayed at ashrams, met monks, and read the Bhagavad Gita. ‘I was close to becoming a monk myself!’, she adds. She went on to discover and study positive psychology. 
                                                                   
 
On this journey to help herself, she used her own life experiences, science and positivity to  craft her own life, which eventually led to the inception of Crafting Our Lives
 
Crafting Our Lives is a repository of tools, techniques, knowledge and processes to empower people to craft their own lives. Dr Ramya shares, ‘I see learning, growing and creating adventure in our lives as an ongoing process.’
 

Mental Health In these COVID Times… 

The pandemic has pushed us hard to look at mental health in a new light. Not only in our personal lives, but even the corporate world is in a churn - to find more empathetic ways of dealing with their employees and break ground on a new style of leadership. 
 
One of the things that the pandemic has done is to make us pause and ask the big questions. This is a good thing as it stops our autopilot mode and makes us relook at our lives. 
 
Churns are not comfortable. But people are getting more in touch with themselves and their personal values. And collectively, as a society we are being pushed to think about what we want to create. This process is inside out. 
 
A transformation is happening. It is not joyous but it is happening. And we will all come out better.’ she shares. 
 
Crafting Our Lives is working on three fronts to help people cope during these turbulent times: 
  • They are creating a lot of relevant mental health information available through their social media handles. They talk about mental well-being, how to build mental resilience, building on strengths, honing in our intuition and more. You can read more here and here
  • To help people build mental resilience, Dr Ramya conducted a free two day webinar while asking the participants to donate to a few verified and genuine organisations/causes that are bringing relief to those in dire need of help which include Oxygen Cylinder Relief, Multiple Areas of Covid Aid/Relief and Meal DistributionThe webinar was attended by close to 100 participants and was engaging, informative and was free for all. You can check out the recording of this gift workshop here.
  • Apart from being a coach, facilitator and a faculty, Dr Ramya is also a certified yoga and certified teacher. She was recently invited to be a part of a 24 hour meditation session called ‘Meditate for India’ conducted by Helping Hands. 
 
This gave birth to her latest offering where she holds space for people to come together and meditate. She created a 21 day meditation to hold space for people to come together and meditate. With this series, she hoped to introduce the idea of meditation and dispel any myths and misconceptions around it. She wanted people, especially the younger generation, to know that meditation can be done in many different ways and that it is not something that takes you away from everyday life but helps you build and show up more for it. 
 
                                                   
 

Conclusion: What the future holds...

Coming up next is Dr Ramya’s signature bootcamp for beginners. It is a two month online workshop that includes interactive experiential sessions, recorded video content, meditation and exercises. 
 
She hopes to make this available for everyone so that she can help take this work forward. If you are interested, you can check out the details here.
 
The pandemic is really changing our present and future ways of life. It will be a while before we can make sense of it all.  
 
While frontline medical warriors try to save the nation, many small enterprises and individuals, like Dr Ramya Ranganathan are making the effort to help people in their own way. 
 
And we, at FlexiBees, want to honour and amplify their effort by sharing their stories. 
 
During these difficult times, let us help one another. If you want to read more such stories, check out the work done by Educate Girls, senOcare and MyTree