Welcome to the Ethos of Care journal. This is the first of many explorations into the intersections of creativity, psychology, and healing—where we'll discover what ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience both tell us: that making things with our hands can heal us in ways that thinking alone cannot.
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There is an acute degree of suffering that defines our present moment. You might recognize it: the anxiety that lives in your chest even when nothing is objectively wrong. The grief that has nowhere to go because there's no ritual to hold it. The sense that life is moving very fast, but meaning very little. The exhaustion of managing everything in your head while your body feels strangely disconnected from the world around you.
If you've found your way here, you've probably already tried the conventional solutions. Therapy helped—to a point. Meditation apps promised calm, but felt too abstract, leaving you frustrated when your mind wouldn't quiet. Self-help books made sense intellectually, but they didn't shift anything viscerally. You're not broken. You're simply discovering what many are learning: talk therapy and cognitive approaches, while valuable, aren't always enough.
This is where creative practice enters—not as a hobby, not as distraction, but as genuine therapeutic intervention.
What Your Body Knows That Your Mind Doesn't
Here's what neuroscience reveals: anxiety lives in your body, not just your thoughts. When you're anxious, your sympathetic nervous system activates—heart rate increases, muscles tense, stress hormones flood your system. You can talk about your anxiety for hours, understand its origins perfectly, and still feel that tightness in your chest, because your nervous system hasn't received the signal that you are safe.
This is where bilateral rhythmic movement changes everything.
When you knit, crochet, or engage in other repetitive hand movements that cross your body's midline, something remarkable happens. The bilateral stimulation activates your parasympathetic nervous system—your body's built-in calming mechanism. Your heart rate slows. Cortisol decreases. The physical experience of anxiety begins to dissolve, not because you've thought your way out of it, but because your body has received direct sensory information that contradicts the threat response.
Research supports this understanding. For example, studies on knitting and anxiety show measurable reductions in stress hormones and heart rate variability.[1][2] This isn't the placebo effect in action, nor is it wishful thinking. It's physiology. Your hands are having a conversation with your nervous system that your mind can't always mediate.
Why Making Meaning Requires Making Things
The therapeutic power of creative practice goes beyond nervous system regulation. There is something deeper happening when we make things with our hands—something that speaks to the crisis of meaning in contemporary life.
We live in a profoundly dematerialized world. Most of our work produces nothing we can touch. We send emails, attend Zoom meetings, update spreadsheets—all valuable, all necessary, but none of it yields something we can hold in our hands at the end of any given day. We are the first humans in history whose daily labor rarely results in tangible creation.
This matters more than we realize. For millennia, humans understood themselves through what they made. The basket woven, the bread baked, the garment sewn—these weren't just products. They were proof of agency, demonstrations of skill, contributions to community. Making things was how we knew ourselves to be capable of participating in creating the world we inhabited.
When we lose connection to making, we lose a fundamental way of knowing ourselves.
Creative practice restores this. When you complete a piece of embroidery or finish coloring a meditation card, you haven't just passed time—you've transformed materials through your attention and intention into something that didn't exist before. This is profound. You've exercised agency in a world that often feels unchangeable. You've brought something new into being. You've participated in creation, rather than just passive consumption.
This creative act is how we touch transcendence, how we participate in something larger than our individual anxieties, how we make meaning in a world that rarely unfolds in a cohesive manner.
Different Crafts, Different Healing
Not all creative practices work the same way, and this is important to understand.
Different modalities address different psychological needs.
Repetitive, predictable crafts like knitting excel at anxiety relief. The bilateral rhythm, the knowable outcome, the sense of control—these qualities directly counter the racing thoughts and physical activation of anxiety.
Fluid, unpredictable mediums like watercolor work differently. They teach surrender, letting go of control, allowing things to emerge, rather than forcing them into being. This speaks directly to depression, rigidity, or the part of us that constantly tries to manage everything.
Tactile, body-based work with materials like clay addresses trauma and grief in ways that purely cognitive or fine-motor activities cannot.[3] When grief or trauma is held in your body, embodied practice can help you externalize what's been carried internally. Forming clay with your hands, feeling its weight and texture, shaping it into vessels that can hold what you're carrying—this offers different support than coloring or knitting.
At Ethos of Care, we're building our offerings around this understanding. Our meditation coloring cards create pathways for anxious minds to find focus and calm. As we grow, we will introduce other practices—each thoughtfully selected for specific therapeutic applications, each curated to support particular kinds of healing.
A Different Kind of Wellness Company
We want to be upfront with you about what Ethos of Care is and about what we're becoming. We started as many small businesses do—with a personal need and a hunch that others might share it. Our founder, Dea Jenkins, discovered in her own journey through anxiety and questions of meaning that creative practice offered something therapy alone could not. Dea's background sits at an unusual intersection: art, theology, and an emerging understanding of psychology and healing. Throughout her research and practices, she kept encountering the same insight from different angles: our hands offer pathways to healing that our minds cannot access alone.
We didn't want to create just another craft company with nice materials and wellness-adjacent language. The world has enough of those. What we wanted—what we believe we need—is something more rigorous and more radical. A place where neuroscience meets contemplative wisdom. Where we don't just claim that crafting helps with anxiety, but can explain the mechanisms. Where products aren't just curated for aesthetics, but selected based on an understanding of which modalities address which psychological needs.
This requires an expertise in integrating many disciplines. It requires taking seriously what psychology, theology, philosophy, art, and sociology each contribute to understanding how humans heal and make meaning. It requires both intellectual rigor and genuine care. It requires being willing to say that creative practice offers genuine therapeutic benefit, supported by research and clinical understanding.
Yes, we are a craft company. We sell beautiful materials. However, we are building toward something larger—a therapeutic arts platform where creative practice is understood and offered as evidence-based supportive intervention. Where research validates what ancient wisdom knew. Where the choice of which craft to practice is as thoughtful as the selection of which therapeutic approach to explore.
We're not there yet. We're small and we're growing. But we are inviting you into this vision from the beginning, because we believe you are looking for exactly what we're building.
What This Means for You Right Now
If you're reading this and feeling seen—if the description of anxiety that lives in your body resonates, if you've been hungry for practices that address meaning and not just symptoms, if you want the therapeutic benefits of creative practice without sacrificing intellectual substance—then you're in the right place.
Starting with our meditation coloring cards is an excellent entry point. They are specifically designed for anxiety relief and present-moment focus, using bilateral hand movements and color psychology to create physiological calm. They are also beautiful, contemplative experiences that honor the deeper work you're doing.
As we introduce new modalities in the coming months, you'll have options matched to your particular needs. Struggling with grief? There will be practices for that. Feeling creatively blocked or depressed? We'll offer different approaches. Seeking ritual and meaning in our secularized society? We're thinking about that too.
We'll be writing here periodically—exploring questions about creativity and healing, sharing research on therapeutic benefits of different practices, wrestling with how we make meaning in contemporary life, and being honest about what we're learning as we build this.
An Invitation
We want to close with an invitation that's both simple and profound: trust your hands.
When you feel the impulse to create something—to color, to knit, to shape clay, to arrange flowers—that's not frivolous. That's not "just" a hobby. That's your body's wisdom pointing you toward a form of support you need. Your hands know something your mind hasn't remembered or figured out just yet.
The dominant culture tells us that healing happens in our heads. That we should think our way through anxiety, intellectualize our grief, optimize our way to meaning. And yes, understanding matters. Reflection is valuable. However, there is a kind of knowing that only comes through making.
So, when you sit down with a set of coloring cards and lose yourself in the simple rhythms of color and line, you aren't escaping your problems. You are engaging a different kind of intelligence. When your breathing slows and your shoulders drop and the tightness in your chest eases, that is your nervous system remembering how to feel safe.
This is what we're here for. This is what we're building together.
Welcome to Ethos of Care. We're grateful you're here.
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Dea Jenkins is the founder of Ethos of Care, where she explores therapeutic creative practices at the intersections of art, psychology, and contemplative wisdom. She holds dual master's degrees in Theology and the Arts, and is deeply invested in understanding how we heal and make meaning in contemporary life.
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Start your practice: Browse our meditation coloring cards designed specifically for anxiety relief and mindful presence.
Join the conversation: Share what brought you here and what kind of creative practice calls to you. Send us a message or connect on Instagram.
Dive deeper: Subscribe to our newsletter for explorations on creativity, psychology, and healing—plus early access to new products and practices as we grow.
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Important Note: Therapeutic Activities vs. Professional Therapy
Ethos of Care offers therapeutic creative practices and educational resources, not psychotherapy or mental health treatment. We are not licensed therapists, counselors, or mental health professionals.
What we offer: Research-informed creative practices that support wellbeing, stress management, and self-reflection. Our products and guidance are designed to complement your wellness routine and can be used alongside professional care.
What we don't offer: Diagnosis, treatment, or management of mental health conditions. We cannot and do not replace professional mental health services.
When to seek professional help: If you are experiencing mental health symptoms that interfere with daily functioning, thoughts of self-harm, or mental health crises, please contact a licensed mental health professional or call 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline).
Creative practice can be a powerful complement to therapy, but it is not a substitute for professional mental health care when that is what you need. Learn more about the difference between therapeutic activities and therapy.
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References and Further Reading
[1] Riley, J., Corkhill, B., & Morris, C. (2013). The benefits of knitting for personal and social wellbeing in adulthood: Findings from an international survey. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(2), 50-57.
[2] Corkhill, B., Hemmings, J., Maddock, A., & Riley, J. (2014). Knitting and wellbeing. Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 12(1), 34-57.
[3] Malchiodi, C. A. (2020). Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process. Guilford Press.
[4] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Post image by Lucas Mendes.
Additional resources on therapeutic creative practice:
- Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants' responses following art making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74-80.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
- Stuckey, H. L., & Nobel, J. (2010). The connection between art, healing, and public health: A review of current literature. American Journal of Public Health, 100(2), 254-263.
