Author: Mariana Rodrigues Cabral

  • Filling Your Own Cup: Persevering in Uncertain Times

    Filling Your Own Cup: Persevering in Uncertain Times

    Do you ever feel like you’re stuck because pieces of you are split up in different places? Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m in limbo. The feeling first started creeping in when I was living somewhere I was anxious to leave and I knew that better opportunities were waiting for me somewhere else. It’s like…

  • Your Brain on Abstract Art: A Guide to Achieving Mindfulness Through Painting

    Your Brain on Abstract Art: A Guide to Achieving Mindfulness Through Painting

    As my relationship with abstract art deepens, I find myself wanting to share all the juicy benefits it’s provided me with the world like a healing elixir. I think if more people knew how welcoming and nurturing painting like this could be, we’d alleviate a lot of the collective tension. Who doesn’t want that?…

  • Painting with Tarot Cards and Uncovering Life Lessons

    Painting with Tarot Cards and Uncovering Life Lessons

    In one of my most recent “From the Art” abstract painting time-lapse videos, I experimented with something a little out of my comfort zone. I combined a developing spiritual practice with my painting practice and became the vessel for what unfolded. While I do this often in the comfort of total solitude, sharing it on…

  • In the Thick of It

    In the Thick of It

    I don’t know how long I had been complacent before I moved out here, but I do remember feeling like Dustin Hoffman in the opening scene of The Graduate — propelling lifelessly on a moving walkway into his future. I bounced from one non-stimulating experience to another and rotated between the same toxic behavioral patterns.…

  • Hold

    There’s an insatiable hunger that food can never dull. It lives in the deepest crevice of your heart, and contorts your dreams till you’re sick. Feed it too much and the hunger spreads. Feed it too little and it’ll eat its way out. Feed it nothing – now that’s the trick…

  • Surface Tension

    He held me on the sidewalk while bodies passed, dodging us like we were delicate birds in the middle of the road. I stained his jacket like the rain looming above our heads threatened to stain the city…

  • Chasing Magic in São Miguel

    Chasing Magic in São Miguel

    I recently traveled to the Azores, back to the island I was born on for the first time alone since we immigrated to the U.S when I was four. I had visited a couple of times in the past with my parents and friends, each time as exhilarating as it was absolute chaos…

  • Listen to Yourself: On Achieving Self-Discipline

    Listen to Yourself: On Achieving Self-Discipline

    When was the last time you sat in silence and felt yourself slip into nothing? Do you ever tune out the noise around you and pay attention to what happens next? If the answer is ‘yes’ and you’ve allowed yourself moments to stall out, this cryptic message taken from a fortune cookie might stir something…

  • A Guy and a Gal in Galway

    A Guy and a Gal in Galway

    The second leg of our journey begins in the heart of Galway’s city center (or centre) with freshly poured beers in hand, watching from the patio of a popular bar as men of different origins, muscle masses, and ABV contents compete for the eternal glory of hanging on a metal bar for the longest amount…

  • A Guy and a Gal in Galway (Part 1)

    A vibrant tale about a couples’ first adventure abroad in a city where the Guinness flows like water and the locals are as friendly as the sheep On May 2nd 2018, my boyfriend, Richard, and I embarked on our first adventure abroad together to Galway, Ireland. Where my anxious brain might’ve expected drunken arguments in…