Meditation doesn’t need to be serious to be effective. In today’s Drawing Meditation session, I gave three prompts. We spent a minute or so on each one, giving enough time to connect deeply.
- Bring to mind a color. A general category is fine, but if you can make it specific, that is even better. “Blue” becomes “sky blue” or “the blue shadow under a cloud”
- Think of a food It could be one that you want to eat or something that you recently enjoyed. Imagine what it tastes like, its scent, the texture of it.
- Visualise a place. It might be a location as contained as an office cubicle or as vast as a mountain range. Recreate it in your mind with as much detail as possible.
With those three things locked in, the drawing part of the meditation was to combine them into one picture. It was the meditator’s choice about how to do that.
I stuck to a realistic but weird depiction of spaghetti and meatballs in a cathedral. I didn’t have any colored art supplies on hand, but in my mind the plate was one of my mother’s goldenrod colored ones.
While I was drawing, I brought both my parents to mind – Mom via her plates and Dad in the cathedral stained glass. Although my sketch is quick and unskillful, I truly enjoyed the memories this unexpected combination of elements allowed me to access. It was a nice break from the other thoughts swirling through my head.
And after our class, I took the same elements and recreated them more abstractly in color. I may reiterate this theme and come up with more ways to depict this specific combination of color, food, and place.
What would you choose for your color, food and place? If you try this, share the results with me!