I’ve been drawing as a form of meditation for quite some time. Actually, I’ve been drawing most of my life. But it was in the last couple of years that I became intentional about drawing as a tool for helping to manage my anxiety and depression. Like a number of art practices, drawing can have a calming and positive effect on the mind and body. There’s a significant body of research to support this claim. For some time, the most well known research centered on music’s ability to positively effect the brain, the breath, and one’s mental state. Now studies on dance, movement, drawing, creative writing, and other artistic practices show similar results. The arts are good for us. And though artists have known this forever, it regularly bears repeating in a world that tends to think more about the relationship between medicine and health than the relationship between art and health.
Quarantining during the Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced this idea in countless ways. It seems that each day begins with a series of questions that primarily produce anxiety – What am I going to do today? What should I do today? Will doing that make any difference? How do I face another zoom session? How can I help? Can I get 10,000 steps in by just walking around my house? What will I do if this is it? On and on and on and on …. until I have myself worked up and convinced that I simply can’t find a way to fit into this new world. I mean, it took decades for me to figure out how to fit into the old world! (All this happens between waking up, showering, and making the first cup of coffee). And then I head to my little home studio. And I draw. I sit, breathe, choose from among my various tools – pencils, pens, brushes, pastel sticks, watercolor crayons, and draw. Maybe it’s a “selfie” drawing, a farmscape, the idea for a comic, a new piece for the Anxiety Project, a leaf, a bird, a tree, or just a series of marks on the paper that are a record of the impulses moving through my hand. And I do this for at least 15 to 20 minutes.
And I’m better afterwards. Some days better than others. My heart rate is slower, my mind is calmer, I can remember to be grateful. Drawing brings me into the present, it draws me out of the trap of regretting the past or worrying too much about the future. Drawing is medicine for my mind and soul.
