Category: Mindfulness

Watercolour : Learning to be a beginner again

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I want to share with you an experience that might be familiar to you if you’re just starting to painting or coming back to it. I like drawing and painting because of what creatives call ‘the zone’ where their attention is solely focused on what they’re creating, not the outside world. So this may not really be a typical meditation but I think it’s a close relation and it’s something I want much more of in my routine to help combat anxiety.

To help clear my thoughts and calm myself after a day of work I wanted to do a simple exercise that would relax me.

Painting negative shapes with watercolour by tracing a photo of leaves I took, with a cup of tea, some fruit and nut dairy milk and listening to the sounds of a thunderstorm as my background music.

By calming my breathing, I lit my favourite smelling candle and just allowed myself to be, trying not to think about what needed doing in the house or other work I could be doing, figuring out ways I could possible multitask to get the maximum efficiency from the moment. Giving myself permission for the next 2 hours to experience something I really enjoyed felt really liberating, like I was treating myself. It reminded me of the feeling I go when I visited a city with no plans other then to be and just taking in the sights around me.

It was a really nice feeling to have on a Thursday evening.
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So now it’s been about an hour and I’m feeling very frustrated. My brain won’t take each step slowly, so I keep messing up the watercolour washes as I rush to get it finished. I’m trying to have that feeling of satisfaction when it’s all completed and looks awesome before it’s been finished. Currently it just looks like random splotches on some paper and i can’t see where I need to go next with it. I haven’t used watercolour like this for about 2 months and normally it’s just simple washes over pencil. I used to do complicated pieces but it looks like I’m no longer at that level…

It’s uncomfortable to see where my skills currently are with watercolour, it’s not what I had planned for this evening to be about but I will still accept it. If I want to improve, I need to see where I’m currently standing to know what needs improving!

So, my times up, it’s Thursday so I need to get a decent amount of sleep before work tomorrow. Inorder to ease my frustration I have gotten my watercolour books out and found one that focuses on layering washes. Tomorrow night I will work through the beginning exercises. I will breath, calm down and allow myself to be a beginner again.

Trying to learn Mindfulness: My beginning

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Stop the bandwagon, I want to get on!

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was I needed a space to record what I was doing. I am increasingly aware that what I enjoy the most about drawing, is the way it lets me experience my own life in a more focused way; really looking at my surroundings, ways of responding to what I see and feel and a way to capture my feelings. For a long long time I have been bogged down by getting it perfect. If I’m doing a life drawing, it has to be exact. I have to capture everything in front of my exactly as I see it or it’s a failure. The pressure of being this perfect has caused me to not want to even start. I know that art is a process, the final images is built up of layers the artist creates through many different decisions, following what their own instinct/ experience is guiding them to choose as they go through their process. I KNOW this and yet…my mind cannot start for fear of being lost and getting it ‘wrong’.

I like to go onto a location and sketch what’s around me and I like to go off script when I do manage it, adding my own imaginative details, making it my own. I don’t make time for this often, it’s a habit I’ve been trying to cultivate for years but my comfort zone doesn’t seem to extend into this area and the habits never stick. It’s so much easier to just snap a photo right? Right, which is why I have a ridiculous amount of photos I have rarely used to draw from.

I have to change. Which is where mindfulness comes into play. I’ve been looking into it for a while, and by looking into I mean reading random posts in pinterest…I read the book ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which seemed to cover some principles of it, looking at how our lives are shaped by where our attention is focused. I signed up to a free online course in Mindfulness and got to week 4 before I stopped making time for it and just gently let my hand fall open and allowed it to drift away from me.

So frustrating!

What I want to achieve is to be more aware of when and where my attention drifts, to change my attitude and achieve some more self-management so I can finally achieve those goals I’ve been setting myself. To stop over thinking and analysing everything that passes through my mind. The fear of change I think is one of life’s biggest stumbling block and boy, does it have a hold of me! I’m so comfy just talking about my want of change, sitting at the beginning before the possibility of getting it ‘wrong’ can come to pass. How do I change from being comfortable to being actively curious enough to move? In my head I have decided that NOW is the time I will do it. I go to sleep, I get up and hey presto, my mind wanders away from the uncomfortable and into my same old routine. Any thoughts that do surface get squished into the ‘to do’ list for tomorrow. Tbh, that’s a pretty long list at the minute…

Now don’t get me wrong, I know I have some very good company with me right now, many people have this dilemma and come to the same response as me. It’s why we put up with the boring jobs because we all know that ‘someday soon’ we won’t be there, we’ll be pursuing our dream of ‘whatevertheheckiwasputonthisplanetfor’ and finally our real lives will start…Ugh, it’s so sad to see it in writing because the answer is so obvious. Someday never comes if you don’t move on from what you’re doing today and do something different.

I want some day now. I want to travel and explore the world with my creative practice and share this with everyone and make people’s lives better but I have to start with me. The me right now is standing on page one of the book she wants to write with a whole wheelbarrow full of tools she’s been hoarding but never using.

I had this thought the other day when walking to my work…” If I don’t do it, it won’t exist for me.” If I don’t change my routine, it will never be full of the new things I want to exist in my world. I will never experience them. I will never ever have them. Not a one.

Mindfulness is one of these things. Chapter One: Learn to be Mindful…How do I do this again?

I’m starting with the book ‘Wherever you go there you are.’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn (it was the first one that looked interesting in my library). I need to get some starting pointers and i can’t get it all from pinterest. I also want to follow some blogs that talk about Mindfulness so if anyone that manages to get to the end of this blog post (I realise it’s quite lengthy right now) has any recommendations, please fire away in the comments section below!

Phew, I needed to get that out there! I hopefully won’t emotionally rant too much on this blog but if anyone is feeling the same as me right now, it would be a real comfort to hear from you in the comments section!