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Happiness Break: Sketching Serenity with Chris Murchison
A guided drawing meditation to help you break out of stale thought patterns and maybe even enter a state of flow. No talent required.
How to Do This Practice:
- Grab a piece of paper and something to draw with.
- Find a comfortable place and start by taking some deep, mindful breaths
- Take a few moments to take in your environment. What colors, shapes, and objects do you see?
- Set a timer and for the next two minutes, draw something that caught your attention. Don’t worry about how it looks and try to stay in the moment.
- Once time is up, spend a moment appreciating what you drew. Think about the impact of slowing down and doing something fun has had on your day.
Today’s Happiness Break host:
Chris Murchison is a meditation teacher, artist and speaker. He currently works as an independent advisor for organizations interested in improving their work cultures.
Check out Chris’s GGSC profile: https://tinyurl.com/32htut6n
Learn more about Chris’s art and other work: https://chrismurchison.com/about
Follow Chris on Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/4auxk3ur
Follow Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/murchisonchris?lang=en
Add Chris on LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/253x83ty
Transcript:
DACHER KELTNER I'm Dacher Keltner. This is Happiness Break, a series by the Science of Happiness where we share short guided practices to help us develop more calm, kindness, connection, and resilience to stress. Welcome. This week, we're trying something new on Happiness Break, a guided drawing practice. We're just going to take a break to get out of our heads and focus on the light, shape, and lines of some object nearby and render it somehow on paper.
Even if you don't think you've got any talent, doing something creative like drawing, painting, or crafting can help us find flow where we can get absorbed in what we're doing and break out of the ruminative thought patterns we might be stuck in.
It can also unlock our imagination. Spurring new ideas, and allowing us to connect the dots of our thoughts in ways we might not have otherwise. Guiding us today is meditation teacher and artist, Chris Murchison. So grab a piece of paper and something to draw with. Here's Chris.
CHRIS MURCHISON Welcome. It's wonderful to be with you here today. Let's begin by taking a few mindful breaths. So I invite you to close your eyes or avert your glance for a moment. And as you breathe, bring your attention to this moment. And to any thoughts passing through your mind, any feelings or emotions that might arise, and also to your body. Please open your eyes and take a few moments to allow your mind and your eyes to travel around the space that you're in.
What is the landscape that you see surrounding you? What do you notice? What textures, colors, light, and shadows? Interesting or odd shapes? Relationships between those things? What memories might be evoked by what you see? What emotions called forth?
What questions might your space be evoking? Or answers? What marvels do you see in your environment? Let's give you a moment to take all of that in. Let your eyes wander around your space.
As your eyes travel the space around you, what is one particular thing that captures your attention?
Now gather your pen and paper, and for the next two minutes, make a drawing of that object that captures your attention. Put your self critic aside, if it appears. This is a drawing just for you, and this is not an art competition. So for the next two minutes, just try to draw the object that captures your attention for two minutes.
Play with shapes, lines, shading, however you want to capture this object.
Again, if that self critic emerges, just put them aside. Pat them on the back and put them aside. Have fun with this.
About 15 seconds left.
Put your pens down and take a moment t appreciate what you've just drawn and think about while you were drawing the object, what did you notice? What more is revealed as you focus your attention on this one object? What did you see? What did it tell you? What story might this object be telling?
And for a different perspective, perhaps a meta perspective, what was the impact of this slowing down? And this focusing of attention, what impact did this exercise have on you? I invite you to take a few more mindful breaths and we'll close by considering how this focusing of attention, how the slowing down might influence how we enter the next moment and the rest of our day. Thank you.
DACHER KELTNER That was artist and meditation teacher, Chris Murchison, guiding us through a mindful drawing practice. And if you've got time to work on your drawing for a little while longer, I'd really encourage you to do so. Enjoy this flow state before you have to get back to the rest of your day. Tell us what you've enjoyed most about taking this mindful drawing break, and share this happiness break with a friend or loved one who you think would also enjoy it, or try it together and tell us how that went.
You can share your experiences by emailing us at happinesspod at berkeley dot edu, or use the hashtag happinesspod. We really appreciate hearing from you, and we'd love to see what you drew.
I'm Dacher Keltner. Thank you for taking this happiness break with us. We'll be back next week with our first episode of a new series I'm really excited about, Climate, Hope, and Science, where we learn more about how the well being of the planet and our own happiness intersect.
This series begins Earth Day, April 22nd.
We love hearing from you! Tell us about your experience of drawing this week. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
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