Classes & Practices

The Well Within Workshop offers meditative mark-making practices to individuals as well as to groups, healthcare professionals, or other organizations looking for an innovative, mindfulness-based team-building experience.

Water & Words

Join us for a unique meditative maker practice that combines watercolors, readings and effective strategies for slowing down and coming home to yourself.

Whether you’re a professional artist making a living off of your art or you haven’t picked up a paintbrush since second grade, the act of painting can be a gratifying, vitality-fueled activity. For many, it’s a form of meditation that feels remarkably satisfying, inspiring, and soothing.

This unique practice encourages participants to reconnect with that steadfast part of our collective maker heritage and, in so doing, to tap innate wellsprings of energy and delight along with a renewed sense of possibility, in painting and in everyday life.

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During this 2.5-hour practice, participants are encouraged to release any expectations of having to produce “beautiful art.” Instead, possibility and play become the animating forces that by their very nature promote one-pointed attention, a key element in many forms of traditional meditation practice.

MATERIALS:

All materials needed for this practice will be provided. Participants are asked to remove street shoes upon entering the workshop and so please feel free to bring along your favorite pair of slippers, stockings, or whatever would have you feeling most comfortable.

Please bring along a cherished book or other reading materials that move you in meaningful ways, however you define that. The purpose of this will be explained during the workshop. NOTE: While our phones, laptops and other devices provide invaluable opportunities for learning, connection, and stimulation, they can also, too often, invite distraction. For this reason, with an eye on providing you with the deepest possible meditative experience, I invite you to consider turning off your phones and other devices as you participate in your practice.

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Make Your Mark

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Making marks is part of our collective history, with a lineage that long precedes those early kindergarten crayon creations. Mark-making is as old as humankind. Colorful ochre images depicting handprints of early hominins, animals, and unique symbols adorning the walls of ancient caves were made over 45,000 years ago. The earliest known mark–a carving on a preserved clam shell discovered on the shores of Indonesia–dates back over 500,000 years ago. We share with our oldest human forbears a collective mark-making ancestry and some researchers hold that the practice of mark-making, then and still, provides an abiding experience of focus, purpose, and soothing comfort. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that the practice of mark-making was essential for survival of the species.

We tap this ancient practice by making marks for their own sake–not for the purpose of “making beautiful art” but rather as a way of slowing down, bringing focus and attention to the here and now. With this practice, the central nervous system is invited to slow down, attention settles as the eyes and the mind are enchanted by immersion in color, shape, and movement.

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