I am committed to bringing as much understanding and peace to this world as I can. in my twenty-plus years of learning about my psychology and trauma, one of the most important things I’ve learned is the vital role of reminding factors.
A reminding factor is something that takes you out of yourself, even for just a second–long enough for you to remember that what’s going on in your head isn’t the whole of reality. Long enough to make a different choice. Long enough to snap your fingers and say, “Oh right! Today I’m working on remembering to notice what I’m really feeling when I want to chew the inside of my cheek.”
I truly feel my companions are a culmination of all the work I’ve done and the best way I’ve found to share what I’ve learned and continue to learn about successfully working with mental health.
For example, the Bunnycake.
The process of creating the Bunnycake is a reminding factor in itself for me. It took me weeks to create and perfect the pattern . It takes me days to create each one!
Each act of creation is intentional. Crafting a Bunnycake is my meditation–the only kind of meditation I’ve found that works for me. I count every single stitch, and I send love and acceptance into every centimeter of yarn that goes into each one. By doing this, I get a chance to have some distance from what’s constantly going on in my head and I can take a look at it in a much less tense environment.
When you bring your Bunnycake home, you hold a physical representation of my connection to my commitment to healing myself, and to each and every person I make a Bunnycake for.
The pages that come with your companion are a distillation of over twenty years of learning how to create a space to live with my psychology, learning to love myself and my thoughts and work with them instead of hating my anxiety, complex PTSD, and depression.
And each hand-crafted Bunnycake comes with a book about how Bunnycakes came to be and insight into how to work with and use them as reminding factors on your mental health journey.
As I told my students when I taught high school English, everyone is suffering, and we have no idea what anyone else’s life is like. Because of this, no one has the right to cause more suffering. Bunnycakes are my way of reaching out and alleviating as much suffering as I can.
I see you, and I know it’s hard.
Remember to have hope. We walk this path together.