Discover the healing power of expressive arts with this hands-on guide
to using creative mindfulness to reduce stress, find presence, and
unlock self-knowledge
Expressive arts educator Rachel Rose weaves together mindfulness
practice and art therapy to demonstrate how tapping into your own innate
creativity can help you find peace in a stressful world
This self-directed guide teaches ten key principles of mindfulness
through ten creative invitations, along with a series of simple
exercises and guided prompts to help you start noticing and flexing your
creative mindfulness muscles:
Requiring no prior experience of the arts or mindfulness meditation,
Creating Stillness provides tools to explore difficult emotions and
find insight into personal struggles and traumatic wounds.
In each chapter, Rose draws from her personal experience as a teacher
and facilitator of creative mindfulness to share stories and examples
that help ground exercises like sketching, creative writing prompts, and
more.
Rose carefully walks through the process each time, explaining how to
set intention and arrive in the present moment before embarking on your
mindful art session; how to use objects and thoughts as creative
prompts; how to return your attention to your work as you move forward;
and how to distill the wisdom you have found in the process.
For seasoned artists, creative mindfulness offers a chance to slow down
and rediscover the transformative power that art can offer when it is
detached from the need to produce something beautiful or useful. For
those coming to expressive arts with existing mindfulness practices or
engaged in a therapeutic process, a mindful arts practice may reveal a
passion for creation you didn't know existed. And for everyone, creative
mindfulness can help us make sense of our feelings and find new ways of
expressing ourselves--in art and in life.
