The holiday season is fast approaching, which means it’s time for the third annual Never Wear Boring Socks gift guide! In this episode, Maria and Anna share their thoughts on the importance of gratitude and how to develop a gratitude practice, and then describe some of their favorite items to gift to others. Whether your preferred type of gift is a product you buy, a food you make, or an experience you share, our co-hosts are sure to offer ideas that will suit everyone on your list.

This week, Anna and Maria discuss a new and exciting topic: permaculture! Permaculture is a form of agriculture that is based on a holistic system of people care, earth care, and future care. Our hosts talk about how permaculture works and why it’s important, how it relates to environmentalism, and its influence on—you guessed it—creativity and wellness. They wrap up with some wisdom from one of Maria’s own mentors.

Our co-hosts are joined this week by guest Heather Sommerlad. A musician and writer, Heather knows her way around the creative process—though isn’t afraid of admitting how difficult it is to create. In this episode, Heather shares her thoughts on the creative motivation and instinct, sharing your creative work, and managing multiple creative pursuits.

Due to Anna’s recent departure from the U.S., our co-hosts are doing something a little different for this episode. Anna shares a voice memo about her first couple weeks of her abroad adventure, and Maria responds with her own updates and advice. Big takeaway this week: give yourself space and do what you need to do to take care of yourself during difficult transitions!

In this episode, Anna and Maria dive into the topic of structure as it relates to creativity. As creatives, many of us are resistant to structure; but as ambitious creatives, our desire to follow through and finish projects often requires some element of structure. Maria and Anna have been leaning into this idea in their own lives, so they’re sharing what’s worked for them. As usual, the specifics of what works best will depend on your circumstances, but they offer some suggestions for structuring space as well as time, with ideas for day-to-day time management as well as longer term goal setting.

This week, Anna and Maria are back from vacation (#cousinreunion), so to keep the vacation vibes going a little longer, they enjoy a summer vacation variety episode! With updates on creative and wellness pursuits, some interesting questions, and a lot of recommendations, our co-hosts keep things light this week to help you enjoy the last few weeks of summer, and to stay creative and well along the way.

We’re SO excited to have wellness director, wholeness lifestyle consultant, writer, and podcaster Kris Mereigh joining us on the podcast this week! We talk about: 

- what it means to be an adult and Kris’ inspiration to start her podcast

- intersectionality and wellness

- what Kris discovered about the word “wellness” through her work

- considering all parts of your identity and what each part needs for self care

- community, ancestry, systems, and your environment as another ingredient of wellness

- the importance of finding self care that works for you

- Kris’ writing practice

- the importance of saying no 

More about Kris:Kris Mereigh is a native and proud New Yorker but considers herself a global citizen. Kris has been an advocate for holistic and identity based wellness since 2013, earning her master’s degree in public health communications from Johns Hopkins University. She fancies herself a life learner and has certifications in health communications; diversity and inclusion; monitoring and evaluation, social entrepreneurship; and body positivity facilitation. She regularly consults with hospitals, universities and K-12’s on inclusion and equity integration into programming and curricula. When she has time, she provides lifestyle coaching to individuals interested in the pursuit of “whole” life living.  

Kris regularly authors for medium and is the cohost of the coming of age lifestyle podcast @AttemptedAdults. She is the 2018 national recipient of the American College Health Association’s New Professionals Affiliate Award for the development of the wholeness framework, used to increase belonging amongst all students of diverse identities within higher education. 

Outside of her professional life, Kris believes in the power of social justice and individual activism. She believes in the intentionality of being a global citizen by engaging in and with languages, regular travel, cuisines galore, dance, and spending time in the beautiful outdoors.

Here at Never Wear Boring Socks, we give out quite a bit of advice. Not because we are experts at life, but because we believe that everyone has valuable insight to share and we can learn a lot from each other’s experiences (and missteps). However, we often have a hard time following the advice we give ourselves. For some reason (and we attempt to shed some light on what this reason might be in this episode), it’s often a lot easier to follow through on things when other people say you should. BUT, given that we believe in the value of our own intuition and inner wisdom, we want to get better at following our own advice, and in this episode we explore several ideas for how to do that.

Anna and Maria have talked about self-care before, but there’s still so much more to cover… and this week, they’re addressing the trendiness of self-care. Is self-care really beneficial, or just another consumer fad? Our fearless hosts dive into the complexities regarding self-care as they examine its role in the marketplace, social media, and our personal lives. They also provide an evaluation of trendy self-care practices as well as ideas for some not-so-trendy ones.

This week, Anna and Maria talk about how we can best navigate the changes in our lives, and how change affects our creative endeavors and wellness practices. Changes of all kinds are inevitable for all of us: living situations, health circumstances, jobs, schedules, relationships...and perhaps especially for those of us in the realm of young adulthood, when so many things seem to be up in the air a lot of the time. So, how can we work with these transitions to mindfully make shifts in our creative lives and our health? How can we make sure our current practices are supporting our changing selves?