Creating Stillness: Mindful Art Practices and Stories for Navigating Anxiety, Stress, and Fear

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:

Anchoring your practice with ritual

Setting intentions

Honoring your impulses

Trusting the process

Non-striving

Letting go

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.