Exploring Creative Mindfulness

It offers a space for processing emotions, fostering healing, and boosting resilience.

Exploring a creative mindfulness practice can lead to profound mental health benefits, enriching wellbeing and the artistic journey.

Embracing Mindfulness for Centuries

Mindfulness and wellbeing practices have been part of all of our communities for centuries.  Whether these practices are faith based such as in Buddhism, prayer and contemplation rituals as well as daily creative practices completed artisans and artisans in all societies.

Understanding Mindfulness Mixed with Creativity

When I started bringing this story together I figured a practical list of creative mindfulness daily actions to explore would be great. But then I started digging further and further into it all.

The mental health benefits came out so strongly, alongside the approach to the mindfulness actions themselves. So that’s where we’re starting, with the bigger picture.

And then you’ll get to dive into a delightful list of practical mindful art practices to find which works for you.

7 Mental Health Benefits of Creative Mindfulness Practices

So what are the mental health benefits for exploring a creative mindfulness practice that are being recognised today?

Exploring a creative mindfulness practice can offer several mental health benefits:

1. Stress Reduction and Mindfulness

Engaging in creative activities mindfully can help reduce stress levels by promoting relaxation and providing a distraction from daily worries and concerns. 

Focusing on the present moment during creative practice allows you to temporarily step away from stressors and find solace in the act of creation.

This simple action can be a powerful circuit breaker for the noise a busy daily life is part of.

2. Increased Self-Awareness

Mindfulness encourages you to cultivate awareness of your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations.  

This can be started with a yoga breath exercise of 10 deep breaths in and out, with the focus simply on the breaths, letting other thoughts be and float away. Any simple action that lets you drop your shoulders is always a lovely start.

Through creative practices such as art-making or writing, you can explore and express you inner experiences, leading to greater self-awareness and insight into your mental and emotional states.

Thankfully this mark making doesn’t have to be art exhibition or publishing quality, it just needs to be itself. It is the doing that matters, not the “quality”.

3. Enhanced Emotional Regulation with Mindfulness

Creative mindfulness practices can help you regulate your emotions more effectively. 

By immersing themselves in the creative process, you learn to acknowledge and accept your emotions without judgment, allowing you to respond to challenging situations with greater resilience and equanimity.

This is in contrast to the stimulants around us to express outrage, frustration, contradiction. While it can be healthy to acknowledge and release these strong negative emotions, you certainly don’t want them to be the focus majority of your daily.

Instead, finding easier paths to inner peace more quickly will make regulating your emotions a faster process. For many, stepping into actions of a creative practice, is one of these shortcuts.

4. Improved Mood

Engaging in creative activities mindfully has been shown to elevate mood and enhance feelings of happiness and wellbeing. 

The act of creating something meaningful and personally fulfilling can boost self-esteem and provide a sense of accomplishment, leading to a more positive outlook on life.

Sometimes we need to reframe an experience so we can find the joy in it. We often are very self-critical and talk to ourselves in a way that we would never tolerate someone we love being spoken to. A quick way to reframe something we’ve been beating ourself up with it to say it in the way we would to our dearest friend. 

5. Promotion of Mindfulness Coping Strategies

Creative mindfulness practices offer individuals an opportunity to develop mindful coping strategies for dealing with difficult emotions or experiences. 

Through creative expression, individuals can process and work through their feelings in a constructive and non-destructive manner, fostering emotional healing and growth.

For many of us who have come through traumatic experiences, such as the loss of a child, the end of relationships, surviving abuse, escaping bushfires, the process of visually releasing this distress can end up being cathartic. We can choose whether we share this work with others or not. It is our experience and our choice.

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Mindfulness in Your Art Practice

Mindfulness in art practice involves being fully present and non-judgmentally aware while creating. It’s about immersing oneself in the process, embracing each moment with openness and curiosity. 

Artists get to engage their senses, observing textures, colours, and sounds without attachment to outcomes. 

They acknowledge emotions that arise, allowing them to inform expression rather than hinder it. 

Mindfulness and Growth

Mindfulness encourages acceptance of imperfections and uncertainties, fostering patience and growth. 

It’s a practice of exploration, where artists delve into their inner experiences and the world around them, cultivating deeper connections and enriching their artistic journey with mindful awareness.

Mindfulness in art practice refers to the intentional cultivation of present-moment awareness and attention while engaging in creative activities. It involves being fully present and engaged in the process of creating art, without judgment or attachment to the outcome.

7 Key Aspects of Mindfulness

Here are seven key aspects of mindfulness in art practice:

1. Present-Moment Awareness 

Mindful art-making involves being fully present in the moment, paying attention to sensory experiences such as sight, sound, touch, and smell as you engage in the creative process.

You can include activities that are specifically about the sensory experiences, such as how to draw the sound of Lorikeets having an end of day gossip. Or create a colour palette of the smells from the kitchen or garden. It is your own experimental exploration, opening the doors to your imagination, and all without judgement. 

2. Non-Judgment

Mindfulness encourages acceptance and non-judgment of one’s thoughts, feelings, and artistic expressions. 

Rather than evaluating or critiquing your work as “good” or “bad,” you observe and accept your creative process without attachment to outcomes.

This can be powerfully liberating, especially for those who struggle with thoughts around “perfection” and then end up nowhere, exploring nothing.

This practice of non-judgement is creativity’s best friend, as it unleashes creativity, liberating the muse from the handcuffs of perfection and critique.

3. Connection to the Senses

Engaging the senses mindfully can deepen the artistic experience. 

This might involve noticing the texture of materials, the colours and shapes you see, or the sounds around you as you work.

As artisans and artists our connection to our senses is deeply important, it is how we interpret the world around us, finding the creative paths to translating it in a variety of mediums.

4. Exploration and Curiosity

Mindful art-making encourages a spirit of exploration and curiosity. 

Rather than striving for a specific result, you approach your creative practice with an open mind, exploring different techniques, materials, and ideas.

So often we come to our creative spaces with specific ideas of what we’ll create, and while this can be useful for the really planned out works, we shouldn’t do it every time.

Instead, giving ourselves time and space, permission, to just explore what might even feel quite random, or quite mundane, can be game changing. As well as really fun and playful. 

5. Emotional Awareness and Mindfulness

Mindfulness invites awareness of your emotions as they arise during the artistic process. You acknowledge and observe these emotions without becoming overwhelmed or attached to them, allowing them to inform your creative expression.

For many of us, the emotions that sit below the triggers can come to the surface as we are mark making. Acknowledging these emotions at this time, when we’re creating, can be a safe and healing process.

While other times, our playful inner six year old comes out in joy and we should always embrace and share this special time.

6. Reflection and Insight

Mindfulness in art practice often involves reflecting on your creative process and gaining insights into yourself and your surroundings through artistic expression. 

This reflection can deepen your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

It is one of the main reasons many of us are drawn to our art practice and creativity journeys. Rarely is it an obvious, early on experience. Often it has a slow dawn that can may seem to come from behind a cloud bank that we’re just hoping to find the silver lining to.

7 Creative Art Practices for Mindfulness and Wellbeing

So that’s the theory, the concepts and ideas that entwine around and through mindfulness and wellbeing.

Now it is time for some really practical actions, processes for you to explore, to experiment with to find what makes your muse sing at different stages.

Here are seven creative practices that artists, makers, or artisans can consider incorporating into their daily routine to nurture their creativity (with a bonus one at the end, so technically eight!) :

1. Daily Sketching or Doodling

This is one of my favourites.

Set aside time each day to sketch or doodle in a sketchbook. This practice encourages experimentation, exploration, and the development of new ideas.

Get yourself a cheap and cheerful sketchbook for this practice, one that isn’t amazingly precious with handcrafted paper from Italy. One from Aldi, the $2 shop etc, maybe A4 size? Whatever gives you joy and you can make a mess of and then look back over it 12 months later and remember what fun you had filling up the pages.

Often I sit in front of the TV with my A4 sketchbook, a tin of pencils and just mark make. I’ve got past the point of being too concern or over-analytical of what I’ll do. For me, it is about having fun with my art supplies. It can be about whatever you like for you.

2. Mindful Observation Walks

Take a daily walk with the intention of observing the world around you mindfully. Notice the colours, shapes, textures, and sounds in your environment, allowing them to inspire your creative process.

This has benefits on so many levels, from breathing, moving, observing, being in the moment. You can go for a 10 minute walk to a 10 km walk, whatever works on the day.

Something this is also fun to do is to take photos of what you observe. A friend of mine shares these on her socials, I tend to think I will and then forget because I don’t have my glasses on and then there is something else engaging! (To be frank, I often come up with story ideas when I’m walking and go down that rabbit hole!)

3. Morning Pages

Start your day by writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing in a journal. This practice, popularised by Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way,” helps clear the mind and unlock creativity.

Many of our members have found great inspiration and joy in practising Julia Cameron’s advice.

4. Creative Challenges

Set yourself daily creative challenges or prompts to spark inspiration and push your creative boundaries. This could involve experimenting with a new medium, exploring a different subject matter, or trying out a new technique.

It can be the perfect way to explore your art and craft supplies, test out ideas, especially ones that you either doubt yourself about or have been itching to give a go.

What’s Next…

I’ve been finding action lists really useful to allowing me to be on the paths that are important to me. So maybe you would too? This is about clarity and purpose rather than noisy To Do Lists!

• From here, make a list of 3 – 4 activities, practices that you would like to explore.
• Write down how you might like to explore these practices in a way that works for you.
• Look at your diary/planner/calendar and make a space for at least one or two of these activities. 
• Then give it a go.
• Review and adapt as needed.

The key is to be kind and gentle with yourself. Doing a little sometimes is way more beneficial that beating yourself up needlessly.

Enjoy!

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