Practicing Mindfulness and Art

My off-site advisor leant me a really cool book a couple weeks ago called Spirituality and Art Therapy. It contains chapters written by art therapists of different religions and they talk about how they incorporate various aspects of their religions into their art therapy. A chapter that I read last week was by a therapist named Bernie Marek, who incorporates Buddhist practices into his art therapy groups. His main focus is meditation and mindfulness, and he stresses the importance of having a community in order to heal. At the end of his chapter, he includes a couple exercises on mindfulness.

The first one is a form of meditation that he calls a "body scan," which involves a person reflecting on where in their body they feel tense or anxious, or any place in the body that they feel is holding "energy," then imagining if this place has a color, shape, or texture. Then the person works with paint, pastel, or clay to allow the image to be released from inside. Marek stresses how this exercise isn't about making a rendition of the image in your mind, but instead creating freely and helping the image grow.

The next practice Marek calls "listening and learning from your images." This one is really similar to the reflection aspect of the Open Studio Project that I discussed in my last post. Marek encourages the people in his group to really observe their art after they finish making it. What do they notice about the imagery, color, shapes, textures, and movements? Then he has the participants write about their art. Here thy have three options on how to write. They can either write descriptively about the art, or write a story, or a combination of the two. Writing a story involves really tapping into the imagination, meaning that the writer can make up how each part of their art, every color, shape, and image, relates to each other. What does each part have to say to each other? The most important thing, according to Marek, is to write freely without taking the pen off the paper. This exercise also requires relaxation, practice, attention to detail, and the openness to receive thoughts on your experience.