An Artful Path to Mindfulness by Janet Slom

An Artful Path to Mindfulness by Janet Slom

Author:Janet Slom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mindfulness-based self-expression;mbse;mindfulness-based stress reduction;mbsr;creative journal;art therapy;stress relief;mindfulness
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2020-04-08T22:17:36+00:00


What is your relationship to “ugly” now? What has changed?

Set your torn pieces someplace safe so you can use them for the next exercise.

Any time you repeat this exercise, journal about your experience.

Mindful Art Encounter #17: Rebuilding, Collage Part 2

Materials: Torn pieces from Mindful Art Encounter #16; colored pencils, pens, or crayons; glue; paper; journal

This art encounter is an extension of encounters #8, Rebuilding, Collage Part 1 (week 2). It invites you to open possibilities to see more deeply, revealing new options.

Start this encounter by standing in Mountain pose, another important tool in your mindfulness toolbox. This pose is designed to bring greater awareness to the body as it stands upright, anchored to the ground and filled with the strength of a mountain.

Standing with your feet hip-distance apart, arms at your sides. Stand upright with your spine straight, feeling into the body as a whole. Stay in Standing Mountain pose for three minutes. Feel the mountain breathing in and out, staying strong and connected with the air expanding and releasing the breath. Breathe into your sense of “mountain-ness”: your strength and rooted presence, your dignity and uprightness.

As you become familiar with the weather of reactivity, you can learn to feel into the mountain-like quality within you. The mountain stays strong through winds, storms, floods, lightning, snow, and hurricanes. The mountain remains rooted in its mountainous quality of inner strength.

Come out of the pose and bring your attention to the torn pieces of your ugly drawing from the previous encounter. Select one piece at a time and color only half of the piece with a new color of love, presence, imagination, response, and acceptance and self-compassion. Continue coloring half of each piece.

Each piece of torn paper will now have two differently colored halves: one with the reactive color that feels like aversion, the other with the responding color of love.

Begin creating a new reality by gluing these pieces into a new composition, with new relationships. Before gluing the pieces into a permanent position, play with all the different possibilities.

You may choose whatever exploration you are most interested in—whether pattern, color, rhythm, or relationships of shapes and color—and follow it in-depth, improvising, playing with options and possibilities before gluing your pieces down. Like a child playing with building blocks, experiment with different creative combinations to create different structures, designs, or abstract compositions. Remember, you are in the process of the experiment that is your life. You are exploring new territory that you have not explored before. You are the only traveler of your journey; your way is different from any other. Be willing to fall down, feel lost, not know what you are doing. Keep going and commit to playing with this process of discovery. Perhaps try the following:

Play with the notion of color.

Place colors next to each other and see what relationships form. As you play with colors, what do you discover about colors and their placement? What does each color do to the surrounding colors? How does black relate to color? How does white relate to color?

Play with the idea of pattern.



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